How Google creates the Year in Search

We Googled “Labubus.”

We searched for “beaded sardine bags,” and recipes like “cabbage boil” and “hot honey cottage cheese sweet potato beef bowl.”

We wanted information about Charlie Kirk and Zohran Mamdani, about Sinners, Weapons, and KPop Demon Hunters.

We desperately needed to know why kids kept saying “6-7.”

Together, these queries defined 2025.

The 24th edition of Google’s Year in Search, the company’s annual top 10 lists of users’ most-searched items, debuted today. These hundreds of lists both validate our own obsessions and take us out of our own bubbles and echo chambers, offering insights into what our fellow humans are interested in.

Year in Search is the flagship project from Google Trends, a relatively small global department within the company. Simon Rogers, a data journalist who helped build out The Guardian’s data visualization team in his native London before becoming Twitter’s data editor, has led the Trends team since 2015. In May, he will release a book, What We Ask Google, “an epic snapshot, two decades long and counting, of our collective brain.”

Rogers spoke with me about the human effort behind Google Trends, what consistently surprises him about the data, and why it can be a source for hope in a dark time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the role of the Google Trends division at Google?

We are responsible for Year in Search. We also create content that shows up on the Trends site—we’ve got some curated pages there, in addition to all our exploration tools. We work with NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and directly with newsrooms to get them data when they need it, often around big events. We do our own data visualization storytelling as well. We’re not a big team. We’ve got people in the U.S., we’ve got some people in Europe, a couple of people in South America, and we have somebody in Australia. We are a mixture of analysts and people with data journalism backgrounds, like myself.

I don’t think of us as a typical tech company analytics team. That’s not our job at all. We’re there to find the stories in the data, and the humanity. It’s an enormous dataset, and it’s ever-changing. It’s not static; it’s not like GDP [gross domestic product] figures or something that’s fixed at a certain point. It’s constantly evolving and reacting to the world, as humans react to the world.

You were on the cutting edge of data journalism at The Guardian, and in those early days, you said that “data journalism is the new punk.” Do you still think so?

Part of the appeal for me was that it lowered the barriers for entry to creating content. Anybody could access data and data visualization tools, and make visuals. It had that in common with punk, which was about anybody picking up a guitar and setting up a band. One of the things that I love about Trends data is that it is publicly available; anybody can use it and make anything with it. It’s probably the world’s biggest publicly available dataset. We don’t tell people what to do with it, which is why I think Google Trends has such a wide following.

It’s not just journalists who use the site. It’s content creators. People working in NGOs. Marketers. We’ve seen the UN use it in Afghanistan when the U.S. withdrew, and in Ukraine when the war started, to look at how refugees searched in certain areas. The Pew Trust did a report based on Trends data from Flint, Michigan, and how people searched around the water issues there. It’s incredibly versatile as a dataset, but it’s publicly available and it’s transparent. And that’s one of the things I feel really good about every day.

As technology advances, are people changing the way they engage with the data?

Definitely. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development did an experiment where they would use Trends plus AI to generate weekly GDP figures, which are [usually] quarterly, and they wrote a paper on it. People are more data literate now than at any time in history, because of the amount of stuff that’s out there. But there’s a recognition that this data will tell you something about the world that you’re not going to get anywhere else. Because if you want to keep your finger on the pulse, this is literally the pulse.

Is this thing you’ve built essentially just working in the background all the time? How much human work is involved?

You’ve written about how the data can show a lot of spikes in real time, but that those signals may not be as important as relative interest over time?

Imagine an F1 race. The winners will be the top searches. But the “acceleration” would define whether something has trended or not. If something’s a breakout, it means it’s trended—it’s increased by 5,000% over time. [We] just launched a Trending Now section on the Google Trends site, and you can see what’s trending every day on there, whether it’s a soccer match or the government shutdown. Those things will just automatically show up there.

With Year in Search, we use trending as opposed to top search. Because if you look at the top searches on Google, they’re always the same. It’s the weather. It’s people typing “YouTube” into their search bar. But with things like KPop Demon Hunters, that’s come from nowhere, spiked up, and it reflects the moment we were in.

What does Google Trends tell us about how our attention spans have changed over the past few years?

I don’t know that it reflects changes in attention spans, because we’re pretty ephemeral as humans. Part of the reason I did this book is because my mother died, and I found myself searching for a lot of things around dealing with grief. I could see that I was not alone. A lot of these things are constant, because they’re constants in our lives. We have kids, we have pets. We eat food. We want to help people.

You [also] get these rhythmic searches. There are waves where, say, “how to learn piano” spikes ahead of Christmas, because people want to learn how to play piano for their holiday celebrations. Or certain health conditions, like [during] flu season. Hal Varian, who was the former chief economist at Google, wrote a paper on how there are a lot of economic factors that you can see spike in search before they show up in the official statistics. People searching for job seekers’ benefits will show up before jobless figures increase.

But then there are things that just come and go. This year it’s Labubus or KPop Demon Hunters. Or the movie Weapons. If you were looking at Trends a few years ago, you would have seen a spike for searches in the “Cups” song [from] Pitch Perfect 2. Every teenager learned how to do the “Cups” song. It’s kind of a snapshot of history, in a way.

When you compile these lists, do you see a big difference between what’s trending in the U.S. and the rest of the world?

Obviously, you get regional variations—if you’re looking for baseball, the U.S. is going to be tops. Some things are constant, like donations or helping or love. And then some things really vary, because of the conditions. For instance, I wrote in my book that you see spikes in searches for “food” from war-torn regions like Somalia or Ukraine. “Refugees” is more searched in countries where refugees go than in the countries where they originate from. I’m often curious about why something’s spiking in a certain place. Liverpool Football Club is more searched for in a town in Uganda than in Liverpool itself.

There’s [also] a reflection of the spread of global culture. When you and I were growing up in England, “promposals” were not a thing, right? It was very much an American search, [where] you’d see a spike before prom every year. Now it’s a global phenomenon. It shows up everywhere . . . in Sweden, Germany, Australia.

You sent me some of the 2025 lists, and I’ve got to be honest—I don’t know what half of these things are. There’s something on the Viral Products list that I had to look up: “beaded sardine bag”?! Do things surprise you, too?

Luckily for us, my team is all younger, so everybody can explain stuff to me. This year in Year in Search, we’re planning to integrate AI mode explanations, so people click on a button and get caught up on what the trends are.

You previously said that we’d never seen a year in search like 2020. Is that still true?

2020 was unique in a lot of ways. You saw these massive spikes as the economy reeled from COVID—things like “unemployment” and “food banks” were at a high. It was an election year. There was a lot of news. All these things were just spiking much higher than they would have done a normal year. Things like vinyl LPs went up, and they stayed higher. Tequila, as well. We also saw a spike in “loneliness,” but also people searching for “how to help.” Those have kept increasing. We tend to think everything is terrible, people are terrible. But that’s not what you see in the way people search. Often, people are looking for how to help other people, or even how to improve the way they interact with other people.

Do you have any expectations for search trends in 2026?

There’s a revolution happening in the way we search stuff right now, in terms of the way AI is being used. You can see search changing through the data: queries are getting longer [and] much more specific. We’re almost doing a cognitive offload to AI; we’re asking quite complex things to get answers for. This year is the 24th Year in Search. It goes back to 2001, when it was called Google Zeitgeist. It was just a list. Now 74 countries around the world will have their own Year in Search.

Tell me more about your book.

It’s not a book about technology, but it’s about how we use it, and what that says about us. It’s about everyday searches. We talk about the “sandwich generation,” which is my age group where you’re looking after your parents but also looking after kids—you see that in search. Originally, I was going to call it something like “Life Is Hard” because it also reflects that we don’t know how to do a lot of things. One of the top food searches is “how to boil an egg.” It’s a repeated search, which suggests that we’re repeatedly searching how to boil an egg. We need to be reminded of some of these things.

When I was searching personally [about] grief, I felt quite alone. I could see from the data that I wasn’t, that there are loads of people doing the same thing. We worry about [a sense of] community and being part of a community. I think maybe we are part of communities; we just don’t always realize it. Whether it’s people who don’t know how to boil eggs, or people like me who search for weird Beatles recordings, or whatever it is.

The boiled egg thing is real. Every time I boil an egg I’m, like, how many minutes again for hard-boiled?

Yeah, and I must have boiled 500,000 in my life or something. It’s kind of nuts.

I’m just thinking now, if you were an alien who landed on Earth and you were only given Trends information, you could probably follow a story of humanity.

I actually used that in my book! If everybody had gone away, you could tell who we were from the way we searched.

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