Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Web Zeitgeist

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the meta-surfing dept.

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."

11 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Hurry! We can still influence the 2002 results! by dagg · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Let's vote for a word or phrase and try to get it added to the 2002 results. I vote for: this.

    If all goes well... we should see something like this:

    December 15th, 2002: slashdot user calls on the world to search for the word insert word here so as to manipulate the 2002 Zeitgeist results
    --
    Sex - Find It
  2. Woe as me by sx10 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's a pretty sad state of affairs when spiderman and shakira are the most pressing issues people want to research on the internet.

    1. Re:Woe as me by hdparm · · Score: 3, Insightful
      You are absolutelly right.

      Statistics like this one tell us something, don't they? Average human being is mediocre who has very little interest in anything beyond basic needs and fun/amusement. People who realise this are able to communicate with masses, get their agenda out there and capitalise on it in various ways.

      No wonder entertainment corporations make shitloads of money each and every year and fundamentalists of all flavours have so much followers - to name just a few consequences.

  3. Chu Mei-Feng at #20 by The+Moving+Shadow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They can't really explain it properly on Lycos, but Taiwanese politician Chu Mei-Feng was ranked #20 on the Lycos search charts over the last year. Personally i have never heard of him, and i think the majority of the non asian people here too. Makes you figure how much asian sites and users make up the whole of the internet while we (read: I) surf only those pages with our western fonts.

  4. Re:from the Lycos FAQ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hmmh. What is so sick and twisted about pornography? There are actual sick and twisted things too, few of which relate to sexual material (some do sure, but those perversions are in minority and unlikely to hit top search spots).

  5. Re:What google neglected to mention... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    shakira is hot, has a 140 IQ, and hates silicone.

    what could be sweeter

  6. Completely incomplete without porn. by NineNine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hate to say it, but this is completely useless since they stripped out anything objectionable. I didn't see porn or sex or anything relating to sex on there at all. This is like the "sanitized for TV" version of the stats, which in my mind, aren't really stats at all.

  7. What about internet2? by TeddyR · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What about sites that are located in internet2. Wasnt that supposed have been created by the major research universities as a result of the commercialism of the "Regular" internet?

    http://www.internet2.edu/

    Many universities now have their own internal search engines that their students connect to... Many of those searches are not factored in these results either.

    Many users go directly to their most used sites like cnn.com or espn.com and search for what they want there. Those results may not be factored in to the google or lycos results...

    Then comes places like AOL that still have millions of users that do searches from within the AOL client which are not factored in either...

    --

    --
    Time is on my side
  8. Re:What google neglected to mention... by jfedor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    BTW, this is offtopic, but Mr. Malda recently mentioned in a Journal comment that Slashdot has too many "+5, Funny" comments. I agree with this sentiment,

    Why don't you just set the Reason Modifier in your preferences accordingly.

    Oh, I know. You'd have to log in to do that.

    -jfedor

  9. What a hopeful world we live in by TheDarkener · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When the top 100 searches on a search engine have mostly to do with entertainment (I.E. Spears, Football, Linkin Park, etc.)

    If I was religious, I'd pray for the state of our people. What a horribly depressing top 100 list. Have we got nothing else to think about besides damned Brittany?

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  10. Re:from the Lycos FAQ...Media Distortion by mcowger · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I know you are joking, but to seriously answer, I would bet the reason they drop adult topics, etc, is they would skew the results into oblivion :0).