Search behaviour this year reflected a mix of curiosity, confusion, excitement and constant change, mirroring the mood of a nation trying to keep pace with rapid shifts around it.
Google Year in Search: What caught India’s curiosity in 2025? (credits: IANS/ANI)
Google Year in Search 2025: In a year defined by the explosive rise of artificial intelligence, India turned to Google with more questions about culture, sports, politics, lifestyle, entertainment, and even the unexpectedly viral “What does pookie mean?”
Search behaviour this year reflected a mix of curiosity, confusion, excitement and constant change, mirroring the mood of a nation trying to keep pace with rapid shifts around it.
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AI dominated the public imagination. Google continued to upgrade two of its most talked-about products: Gemini and NotepadLM. While Gemini promised real-time information powered by its latest multimodal intelligence, NotepadLM quickly became a daily companion, helping users summarise PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs and Slides with remarkable ease.
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Beyond Google, India’s interest spread across a range of AI tools: Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Google AI Studio, ChatGPT, Flow and various Ghibli-style image generators, showing how AI is slowly blending into everyday life and creative expression.
Sports continued to fuel the country’s search fever. Major events such as the IPL, Asia Cup, ICC Champions Trophy, Pro Kabaddi League, Women’s World Cup, FIFA Club World Cup, PSL, Wimbledon, Nations League and Major League Cricket kept fans constantly looking up schedules, squads and results.
While cricket remained the heartbeat of Indian searches, the nation also celebrated a defining moment in women’s sport with a historic Women’s World Cup win, a triumph that sparked a wave of pride and attention.
Searches for other sports also grew strong, signalling the country’s increasingly diverse sporting appetite.
Politics remained another powerful driver of search activity. With several important state elections, people looked up the Bihar polls, Delhi results and questions surrounding the voting process itself.
India-Pakistan tensions, updates from Pahalgam and developments in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor added to the political curiosity.
Travel and culture saw their own moments in the spotlight. The Maha Kumbh Mela emerged as a major attraction, drawing massive interest from spiritual travellers. International destinations like the Philippines, Georgia, Mauritius and especially Phu Quoc saw sharp spikes in searches, while Kashmir, Somnath and Pondicherry remained top domestic picks.
In entertainment, audiences moved towards films across industries. ‘Saiyaara’ struck an emotional chord, ‘Final Destination’ stayed in the conversations, and Southern cinema delivered big releases like ‘Kantara’, with other top searches including ‘Coolie’, ‘War 2’, ‘Sanam Teri Kasam’, ‘Marco’, ‘Housefull 5’, ‘Game Changer’, ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Mahavatar Narsimha’.
The passing of Dharmendra led many Indians to revisit his evergreen career, making him one of the most searched personalities of the year. Other names that caught people’s attention included Vaibhav Suryavanshi, Priyansh Arya, Abhishek Sharma, Shaik Rasheed and Jemimah Rodrigues.
Across all of this, one thread stayed constant: the expanding use of AI in daily life. With more tools offering free access and more people learning to integrate them into work, creativity and communication, searches around AI continued to grow.
If 2025 revealed anything, it’s that India’s curiosity is only getting stronger. That is driven by a desire to understand a rapidly changing world.
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