What did people in Germany google in 2025?

The giant of the information age has given us its annual sneak peek into our own minds, Year in Search. What were people in Germany asking Google in 2025?

Germany’s Year in Search 2025

Would you let anyone else look at your internet habits unfiltered? Probably not! Luckily, it’s just Google and the billions of international companies that it sells your personal information to that get that privilege.

Us civilians get Year in Search, a peek behind the curtain into what each country was Googling in the past year. After Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) lost a confidence vote in mid-December, Germany started the year with a collapsed government and no federal budget. The federal election followed on February 23, and evidently, people were paying close attention, because “Bundestagswahl” was the most searched term of the entire year. 

Germany’s googlers were also interested in the Bundestag who’s who. Year in Search’s “German personalities” category, which is often populated by a mixture of famous celebrities, singers and politicians, included two politicians.

People wanted to know about Friedrich Merz. Who is he? What’s his political background? You can find out all that and more in our profile of the Chancellor. Heidi Reichinnek, the rising star of the Left Party followed as the third-most googled German personality. The so-called “TikTok queen” of the left is widely considered responsible for her party winning nearly 9 percent of the vote in February.

But both Merz and Reichinnek were superseded by Haftbefehl, the most googled German personality in 2025. While the German-Turkish rapper has been on the music scene for a while, a Netflix documentary Babo: The Haftbefehl Story, reignited interest in his story and music.

For the full list of what Germany was googling in 2025, head to the Year in Search website.

Is it just you, or is Google worse than it used to be?

In between googling, “Why is the plate hot, but the food cold after I use the microwave?” (the most common “Why” question in Germany in 2025), or “How can I vote in the federal election?”, you might have had the feeling that Google was getting worse at showing you the search results you were looking for.

According to a report by author and podcaster Ed Zitron, your suspicions are correct. Analysing emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Zitron found that “Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by [Prabhakar] Raghavan [...] actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money."

The strategy adopted by Google and explained by Zitron can be boiled down to this: the worse Google is at quickly and effectively answering your search queries, the more time you are likely to spend on the site and the more opportunities the company has to show you advertisements. 

While previously you might have Googled a question or term once to find a satisfactory answer, it may now take two or three goes before you find the information you are looking for.