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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 Googles 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 Guardians data visualization team in his native London before becoming Twitters 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 sitewe’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. Were 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. Thats not our job at all. We’re there to find the stories in the data, and the humanity. Its an enormous dataset, and its ever-changing. Its not static; it’s not like GDP [gross domestic product] figures or something that’s fixed at a certain point. Its 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. Its 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. Weve 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. [Screen grab: The Guardian] 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? We can’t tell the data what to say. It’s a truly independent source. Trends is basically a sample of all searchesabout a fifth of all searchesand its a random sample. [The data] is anonymized and aggregated. What that means is that you can see a global level, country level, regional level, and city levelwhich is a town in Google geography. But no lower than that. We don’t have demographics. We just know when something happened, and how big it was as a proportion of all searches. Even on the site, you don’t see raw numbers of searches, because that wouldn’t tell you anything. It does give the ability to compare a small place to a big place, in the way that people search for stuff. Or you can compare San Francisco to New York. Youve 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 something̱s a breakout, it means it’s trendedit’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, theyre always the same. Its the weather. Its people typing YouTube into their search bar. But with things like KPop Demon Hunters, thats 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 were 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. Its kind of a snapshot of history, in a way. [Photo: Google Trends] When you compile these lists, do you see a big difference between whats trending in the U.S. and the rest of the world? Obviously, you get regional variationsif 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 Ive got to be honestI don’t know what half of these things are. Theres 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 COVIDthings 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? Theres 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; were 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 youre looking after your parents but also looking after kidsyou 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. Its a repeated search, which suggests that w’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. Its 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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E-Commerce
Amid an uncertain economythe growth of AI, tariffs, rising costscompanies are pulling back on hiring. As layoffs increase, the labor market cools, and unemployment ticks up, were seeing fewer people quitting their jobs. The implication: Many workers will be job hugging and sitting tight in their roles through 2026. Put more pessimistically: Employees are going to feel stuck where they are for the foreseeable future. In many cases, that means staying in unsatisfying jobs. Gallups 2025 State of the Global Workforce report shows that employee engagement has fallen to 21%. And a March 2025 study of 1,000 U.S. workers by advisory and consulting firm Fractional Insights showed that 44% of employees reported feeling workplace angst, despite often showing intent to stay. So if these employees are hugging their current roles, its not an act of affection. Its often in desperation. Being a job hugger means youre feeling anxious, insecure, more likely to stay but also more likely to want to leave, says Erin Eatough, chief science officer and principal adviser at Fractional Insights, which applies organizational psychology insights to the workplace. You often see a self-protective response: Nothing to see here, Im doing a good job, Im not leaving. This performative behavior can be psychologically damaging, especially in a culture of layoffs. If I was scared of losing my job Id try everything to keep it: complimenting my boss, staying late, going to optional meetings, being a good organizational citizen, says Anthony Klotz, professor of organizational behavior at the UCL School of Management in London. But we know that when people arent loving their jobs but are still going above and beyond, that its a one-way trip to burnout. The tight squeeze In cases where jobs arent immediately under threat, the effects of hugging are more likely to be slow burning. When an employees only motivation is to collect a consistent paycheck, discretionary effort drops. Theyre less productive. Engagement takes a huge hit. Over time, that gradually chips away at their well-being. Humans want to feel useful, that they care about the work theyre doing, and that theyre investing their time well, Eatough says. When efforts are low, that can impact a persons sense of value. The effects stretch beyond the workplace, too. Frustrated and reluctant stayers can quickly end up in a vicious cycle, Klotz says, noting, When youre in a situation that feels like its sucking life out of you, you end up ruminating about how depleting it is, then end up so tired that you dont have energy for restorative activities outside of work. So its this downward spiralyou begin your workday even more depleted. Longer term, job hugging stunts growth. When youre looking out for yourself, rather than the team or organization, your investment in working relationships begins to break down, Eatough says. Over time, staying in that situation means youre more likely to become deeply cynical, which hurts the individual and their career trajectory. When hugging becomes clinging Feeling stuck is nothing new. At some point in their careers, most workers will be in a situation where if they could leave for a better role, they would, says Klotz, who predicted the Great Resignation. But what distinguishes job hugging is that its anxiously clinging to a role during unfavorable labor markets. Its not that employees dont want to quitits that they cant. Its human nature that when theres a threat of any sort that we move away from it and towards stability, Klotz says. Your job represents that stability. And currently, its not a great time to switch jobs. There are few options for job huggers. The first is speaking up and working with a manager to improve the situation. But this might be unlikely for employees who feel trapped or lack motivation in the first place. Klotz says cognitive reframing can helpfocusing purely on the positive aspects of a draining role, such as a friendly team, and tuning out the rest. Finally, slowly backing away from extra tasksin other words, quiet quittingcould mean workers can redraw work-life boundaries in the interim at least. Otherwise, beyond Stoic philosophy or a benevolent boss, there is little choice but to wait it out. In some cases, a job hugger may eventually turn it around, ease their grip, and become quietly content in their role. But more often, wanting to quit usually leads to actually quitting. In effect, job hugging is damage control: hanging on until the situation changes. I think well see some people be resilient, wait it out, and find another role, Klotz says. But therell be others in the quagmire of struggling with exhaustion of spending eight hours a day in a job they dont like.
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E-Commerce
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and cloud services has led to a massive demand for computing power. The surge has strained data infrastructure, which requires lots of electricity to operate. A single, midsize data center here on Earth can consume enough electricity to power about 16,500 homes, with even larger facilities using as much as a small city. Over the past few years, tech leaders have increasingly advocated for space-based AI infrastructure as a way to address the power requirements of data centers. In space, sunshinewhich solar panels can convert into electricityis abundant and reliable. On November 4, 2025, Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, a bold proposal to launch an 81-satellite constellation into low Earth orbit. It plans to use the constellation to harvest sunlight to power the next generation of AI data centers in space. So instead of beaming power back to Earth, the constellation would beam data back to Earth. For example, if you asked a chatbot how to bake sourdough bread, instead of firing up a data center in Virginia to craft a response, your query would be beamed up to the constellation in space, processed by chips running purely on solar energy, and the recipe sent back down to your device. Doing so would mean leaving the substantial heat generated behind in the cold vacuum of space. As a technology entrepreneur, I applaud Googles ambitious plan. But as a space scientist, I predict that the company will soon have to reckon with a growing problem: space debris. The mathematics of disaster Space debristhe collection of defunct human-made objects in Earths orbitis already affecting space agencies, companies, and astronauts. This debris includes large pieces, such as spent rocket stages and dead satellites, as well as tiny flecks of paint and other fragments from discontinued satellites. Space debris travels at hypersonic speeds of approximately 17,500 mph in low Earth orbit. At this speed, colliding with a piece of debris the size of a blueberry would feel like being hit by a falling anvil. Satellite breakups and anti-satellite tests have created an alarming amount of debris, a crisis now exacerbated by the rapid expansion of commercial constellations such as SpaceXs Starlink. The Starlink network has more than 7,500 satellites providing global high-speed internet. The U.S. Space Force actively tracks more than 40,000 objects larger than a softball using ground-based radar and optical telescopes. However, this number represents less than 1% of the lethal objects in orbit. The majority are too small for these telescopes to identify and track reliably. In November 2025, three Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station were forced to delay their return to Earth because their capsule had been struck by a piece of space debris. Back in 2018, a similar incident on the International Space Station challenged relations between the U.S. and Russia, as Russian media speculated that a NASA astronaut may have deliberately sabotaged the station. The orbital shell Googles project targetsa sun-synchronous orbit approximately 400 miles above Earthis a prime location for uninterrupted solar energy. At this orbit, the spacecrafts solar arrays will always be in direct sunshine, where they can generate electricity to power the onboard AI payload. But for this reason, sun-synchronous orbit is also the single most congested highway in low Earth orbit, and objects in this orbit are the most likely to collide with other satellites or debris. As new objects arrive and existing objects break apart, low Earth orbit could approach Kessler syndrome. In this theory, once the number of objects in low Earth orbit exceeds a critical threshold, collisions between objects generate a cascade of new debris. Eventually, this cascade of collisions could render certain orbits entirely unusable. Implications for Project Suncatcher Project Suncatcher proposes a cluster of satellites carrying large solar panels. They would fly with a radius of just 1 kilometer, each node spaced less than 200 meters apart. To put that in perspective, imagine a racetrack roughly the size of the Daytona International Speedway, where 81 cars race at 17,500 mph while separated by gaps about the distance you need to safely brake on the highway. This ultradense formation is necessary for the satellites to transmit data to each other. The constellation splits complex AI workloads across all its 81 units, enabling them to think and process data simultaneously as a single, massive, distributed brain. Google is partnering with a space company to launch two prototypesatellites by early 2027 to validate the hardware. But in the vacuum of space, flying in formation is a constant battle against physics. While the atmosphere in low Earth orbit is incredibly thin, it is not empty. Sparse air particles create orbital drag on satellites; this force pushes against the spacecraft, slowing it down and forcing it to drop in altitude. Satellites with large surface areas have more issues with drag, as they can act like a sail catching the wind. To add to this complexity, streams of particles and magnetic fields from the sunknown as space weathercan cause the density of air particles in low Earth orbit to fluctuate in unpredictable ways. These fluctuations directly affect orbital drag. When satellites are spaced less than 200 meters apart, the margin for error evaporates. A single impact could not only destroy one satellite but also send it blasting into its neighbors, triggering a cascade that could wipe out the entire cluster and randomly scatter millions of new pieces of debris into an orbit that is already a minefield. The importance of active avoidance To prevent crashes and cascades, satellite companies could adopt a leave no trace standard, which means designing satellites that do not fragment, release debris, or endanger their neighbors, and that can be safely removed from orbit. For a constellation as dense and intricate as Suncatcher, meeting this standard might require equipping the satellites with reflexes that autonomously detect and dance through a debris field. Suncatchers current design doesnt include these active avoidance capabilities. In the first six months of 2025 alone, SpaceXs Starlink constellation performed a staggering 144,404 collision-avoidance maneuvers to dodge debris and other spacecraft. Similarly, Suncatcher would likely encounter debris larger than a grain of sand every five seconds. Todays object-tracking infrastructure is generally limited to debris larger than a softball, leaving millions of smaller debris pieces effectively invisible to satellite operators. Future constellations will need an onboard detection system that can actively spot these smaller threats and maneuver the satellite autonomously in real time. Equipping Suncatcher with active collision-avoidance capabilities would be an engineering feat. Because of the tight spacing, the constellation would need to respond as a single entity. Satellites would need to reposition in concert, similar to a synchronized flock of birds. Each satellite would need to react to the slightest shift of its neighbor. Paying rent for the orbit Technological solutions, however, can go only so far. In September 2022, the Federal Communications Commission created a rule requiring satellite operators to remove their spacecraft from orbit within five years of the missions completion. This typically involves a controlled de-orbit maneuver. Operators must now reserve enough fuel to fire the thrusters at the end of the mission to lower the satellites altitude, until atmospheric drag takes over and the spacecraft burns up in the atmosphere. However, the rule does not address the debris already in space, nor any future debris, from accidents or mishaps. To tackle these issues, some policymakers have proposed a use tax for space debris removal. A use tax or orbital-use fee would charge satellite operators a levy based on the orbital stress their constellation imposes, much like larger or heavier vehicles paying greater fees to use public roads. These funds would finance active debris-removal missions, which capture and remove the most dangerous pieces of junk. Avoiding collisions is a temporary technical fix, not a long-term solution to the space debris problem. As some companies look to space as a new home for data centers, and others continue to send satellite constellations into orbit, new policies and active debris-removal programs can help keep low Earth orbit open for business. Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti is an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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