I have wanted a dog for twenty five years.

Mum said no when I was six and kept saying it. At university I was too busy “studying”. Then I got married and my wife said no.

Last weekend she said yes.

I asked if she was sure and she said yes, so I asked again, and then a third time, and then I asked her to put it on WhatsApp. She did. I have not asked since, because there is no version of a fourth time that goes well.

So now I have to answer the question I have been asking since I was six. Which one should we adopt?

I have always said golden retriever. I never thought about it much past that, because we never got as far as this question.

Then I went to look at what else was out there and got a bit of a shock. Nobody agrees on how many breeds there even are. Every kennel club keeps its own list. The one I ended up using has hundreds of names on it and I could name about twenty.

Which is the point I got properly excited. Twenty five years of wanting one thing and I had never actually looked at it. There was a lot to learn, and not just the dogs themselves. I wanted to know what everyone else thinks about them.

So I went at it properly. Every name on that list into Google, ten different openings each, to see what people ask. 17,859 suggestions came back. Then five years of Google Trends on top, to see which ones anybody thinks about at all.

This is where I got to.

Almost everyone is asking whether the dog will be a problem.

The most asked question about a dog is "do they shed". 247 different breeds get asked it.

The next one is "are they aggressive". 188 breeds.

More people ask if a dog will bite them than ask if it is clever.

And if you just type a dog's name and stop, most of what Google guesses is where to buy one and what it costs. I have done that too, all week.

Then people get the dog, and the questions go soft.

813 of the questions start with the word why.

Why do they lean on you. Why do they stare at you. Why do they sleep so much. Why do they shake. Why do they look sad.

Nobody asks those before. You ask those at night, with a dog on your foot, being strange.

That is the bit I want.

Everyone is looking at the same fourteen dogs.

Half of all the searching in the world goes to fourteen breeds. Out of hundreds.

Golden retriever is one of them, of course. It was the only name I had.

And more than half of them, nobody asks anything about. Ever.

Not one question. The Aidi. The Alopekis. The Africanis. The Alpine Dachsbracke.

Somebody wrote a rulebook for each of them. Somebody sat in a room and argued about their ears. And nobody has ever wondered one thing about them.

So here they are.

260 dogs. Every side of them, what people ask, and how they measure up against each other.

I still do not know which one. But it is not golden retriever just because it was the only name I had.

Search suggestions from Google autocomplete, United States, ten openings for every name on the list. Interest from Google Trends, five years, against Google's own breed topics. Breed records from Wikipedia and FCI standards. Temperament scores from DogTime and the American Kennel Club. Behaviour measured in real dogs by C-BARQ at the University of Pennsylvania. Lifespans from veterinary records.