You know the UK is experiencing a heatwave when searches for “fans” blow past “onlyfans”
Unprecedentedly hot weather in the UK has left Brits wanting only fans... no, not that kind.
As temperatures have surged over the last week, marking the UK’s second-warmest June since 1884, per the Met Office, inhabitants usually accustomed to cloudy skies have found themselves searching for some cold air relief.
Google searches in the UK for “fan” peaked on June 21 and June 30, when temperatures in London exceeded 32°C (about 90°F) — far surpassing queries related to another, er, heat-centric service: OnlyFans, which usually racks up a similar volume of searches on UK Google.
Indeed, even searches for “air con” — a rarity in the UK, with only ~5% of homes having cooling systems, per CNN — have hit recent peaks in the last week.
The day after his assassination in September, Charlie Kirk’s Wikipedia page was viewed over 170 times per second, or almost 15 million times, according to figures from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Like with most other years, the top entries of the year reflected the fact that millions flock to the platform to learn more about political figures, films, and fatalities.
Though there’s been much talk about the impact of AI-generated search summaries and chatbots on Wikipedia — not least from the platform itself — it’s still clearly a major go-to resource for anyone looking to learn a little about a lot online, especially if this week’s year-end figures are anything to go by.
Though there’s been much talk about the impact of AI-generated search summaries and chatbots on Wikipedia — not least from the platform itself — it’s still clearly a major go-to resource for anyone looking to learn a little about a lot online, especially if this week’s year-end figures are anything to go by.
If you were asked to name the person who saw the biggest spike in Google searches across 2025, you might plump for a pope, perhaps, or a major political figure. Unless you were one particular Polymarket user, you maybe wouldn’t have put too much money on d4vd, a popular 20-year-old singer who reportedly remains an active suspect in the death of a teen girl.
However, when Google revealed its Year in Search 2025 today — a feature that, importantly, seems to reflect the figures and topics that have seen searches spike from last year, rather than overall search volume — d4vd, whose hits like “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” have racked up billions of Spotify streams, sat atop the “People” section, beating Kendrick Lamar for the top spot.
Google’s Year in Search 2025
As people in the business of making charts all day, youcouldsay that we’re pretty au fait with Google Trends data. Even so, we can admit that Polymarket user 0xafEe may be a true savant when it comes to understanding what people are using the search engine for (though there are also allegations that the user is a Google insider or had other access to the information).
In any case, thanks to a series of what are now proving to be very prescient positions on Polymarket’s “#1 Searched Person on Google This Year” market, 0xafEe has made a medium fortune in the last 24 hours. There was a ~$10,600 “yes” position on d4vd himself — now worth more than $200,000 — as well as “no” positions across other candidates for the title, such as Donald Trump, Pope Leo, and Bianca Censori, all of which have profited substantially. All told, 0xafEe made just shy of $1.2 million on the market.
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