India, Oct. 23 -- Six months after his mother Janet Rogers died, Simon Rogers, 58, found himself in a field in northern California, unable to sleep, feeling an overwhelming, disorienting sense of grief.

"When something like that hits you, you feel like you're the only person in the world going through it," says the British data journalist, currently data editor at Google.

He then did what many would do. "I opened Google and started asking questions I was too embarrassed to ask out loud."

"Why is grief so lonely?" "How long does it last?" "What should I say to a grieving friend?"

He then went into the Google Trends dataset, and saw that thousands of people were asking the exact same questions at 3 am. It moved him to peek behind the se...