The year in searches

From a Hollywood Reporter article on the year-end report of search requests from AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos:

• Paris Hilton had the biggest increase [your sex joke here] in search requests since last year—212,000%.



• A quote: "Lycos is predicting, based on its growing number of searches, that the movies 'The Passion of the Christ,' 'Troy' and 'Catwoman' will be hits." I wonder what the market overlap on those is going to be.



• Another one: "'Finding Nemo' has the dubious honor of being probably the year's most downloaded movie at peer-to-peer file-sharing services." Hm. It's stealing; but it's a family-friendly children's movie. Does that balance out? (I suspect the Paris Hilton video is really the most downloaded movie, but I guess that doesn't officially count.)



• On Lycos, Michael Jordan was the third-most-searched-for athlete. What, is he still around? I thought he and all his championship rings had retired to Planet Nike.



• Britney Spears actually "fell off Lycos' top-10 list of search terms for several weeks" (somehow I feel like "fell off" deserves a sex joke too), until she did that kissing-Madonna thing and some sexy magazine covers and rocketed back to the top. Yes, when in doubt, and when unsupported by talent, the best way to grab the spotlight is to take off most of your clothes and engage in para-sexual activity with anyone in sight. (Well, it's less bizarre than when she humped that snake at the 2001 Music Video Awards.)



• And, finally, perhaps the most surprising thing of all: "Al-Jazeera...generated three times as many search queries in April than did the word 'sex.'" I didn't think anything could knock off "sex" as a search term. Wonders never cease.

One of these days I'll have to figure out the most frequent search requests for my site; I fear "m0n$terc0ck$" is going to be one of them. (Characters replaced to avoid further search requests.) I wonder where that ranks on AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos...