Web Zeitgeist

An anonymous reader writes "CNN has a story about Lycos and its 50 top "searched for" items of the year. After excluding "sex", "Dragonball" was #1, followed by "Kazaa", "tattoos", "Britney Spears", and the "NFL" (american football) rounding out the top 5. IRS was #7, and taxes acheived #14. "The Bible" is #21 followed by "Marijuana" at #22. It appears that pop-stars, supermodels, computer games, sports, and september 11th related words heavily dominate the rest of the top 100. How about the biggest declines? Boy bands. nSync down from 36 to 163, and Back Street Boys tumble to 250 from 58. Lycos is hosting the top 100 results this year here with some commentary. Google also has their own comprehensive lists (and cool charts) as well."

ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

How many losers are there trying using a search engine for 'Kazaa'?

Now, were they stupid enough not to get the client at Kazaa.com, or even dumber trying to search the P2P network at the search engine?

Ask Jeeves

[jesser]

Ask Jeeves also posted year-end search trends, but it picked different information to highlight than either Lycos or Google.

Yearly [irconnect.com]: frequent searches, news-related searches, health, CEO scandals, music artists, vacation destinations, products and brands.

For each of the top 5 news stories, the year-end page includes several popular questions related to the news. For example:

2. September 11th Memorial
-- How many people died on September 11, 2001?
-- Is 9-11 a holiday?
-- What events are taking place on September 11, 2002?

Weekly [ask.com]: frequent searches, general advancing queries, movies, and news.

Some of the advancing queries are questions ("What is Kwanzaa?") and some are searches ("Saint Nicholas"), but I don't know whether that difference reflects actual differences in the way people search on aj.com for different types of information.

Re:Am I out of touch...?

[MonTemplar]

Yep, they're all music-related, to varying degrees of talent (and in Shakira's case, a tenuous grip on the English language to boot!)

Gareth Gates is the bloke who didn't win the UK's Pop Idol contest, but will probably outlast the winner, Will Young, by dint of having

1. A decent singing voice.
   
2. Not being gay, hence twice the potential audience.
   
3. Having a discernable personality.
   

As for Las Ketchup, all I know is that I've somehow managed to avoid hearing this all year long. But I bet that if you play it backwards you get Osama Bin Laden saying 'Ha Ha Ha! Ya Missed Me!' :)

MT.

Re:Linux more popular than Microsoft

[Pfhreakaz0id]

just fyi, I didn't know 'til recently, google has a specialized Microsoft search engine www.google.com/microsoft. works pretty well. beats searching the kb from MSDN and it indexes non microsoft sites as well.

Hahah

[autopr0n]

Chu Mei-Feng isn't a guy, it's a woman. A taiwanese Politictian who had a huge sex scandal in Taiwan.

Basically she was the 'girlfriend' you could say of a high-ranking politico who helped her get into the equivalent of congress. (most Americans would have balked, at this point, but in Taiwan it was kosher)

Anyway, he got her a house, and she got lonely so she invited a friend to live with her. Except, her friend ended up putting video cameras in her bedroom and recorded her having sex with lots of different guys. Then released the VCDs.

So, when people searched for "Chu Mei-Feng" they weren't looking for info on the Taiwan-China relations (CMF was pro-unification, fyi), but rather they were looking for .mpg files of her getting fucked.