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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."

19 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Neither "warez" nor "mp3" on the list by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Was this Top 100 sanitized for public consumption?

    Or are people just too smart to use Lycos? ;-)

  2. from the Lycos FAQ... by updog · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Prurient Content: We ignore pornographic, four-letter words and otherwise lewd queries, including names of decidedly adult film stars--unless such terms are driven by news events.

    I think these types of searches would actually be more interesting to see categorized than the others. What sick and twisted things are people searching for? I wonder if this is categorized anywhere?

    1. Re:from the Lycos FAQ... by jesser · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What sick and twisted things are people searching for?

      Disturbing Search Requests: what blog owners find when looking through referrers in web server logs. These tend to be several-word searches, because single-word searches wouldn't take you to a random blog. Examples: "How to suck breasts", "build a giant robot", "cuntless otters", "worlds greatest asshole".

      Google Adwords Keyword Suggestions: type a search term, and it will give common multiple-word searches that include your term. If you type in "porn", the multiple-word searches are child porn, free porn, kiddie porn, chill porn, cartoon porn, porn stars, gay porn, kid porn, lego porn, sex porn, porn nude, moose porn, and lesbian porn.

      Keyword City: 10 most popular search words for the Sex & Pornography category. I don't know how reliable this site is. The top 10 are babe, sex, porn, hardcore, nude, xxx, anal, nudist, naked, and boob.

      Metaspy Exposed: random searches on the Metacrawler search engine in real time. Because these are random, you may have to reload several times before you'll see any porn searches.

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      The shareholder is always right.
  3. A side note by ealar+dlanvuli · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Also to be noted in the google stats is Mac's broke 5% of the total searches for the first time since google started publishing stats. They omitted this from the year end results, but if you check the archives you can see this.

    --
    I live in a giant bucket.
  4. Defying Everything by Malicious · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Leave it to the Backstreet Boys, to be the first boyband, to tumble up.

    Those guys will do anything for attention

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  5. Re:Question by br0ck · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And tonight's number one most popular Lycos search phrase, omitted by Lycos staff from the zeitgeist results, was... best search.

    Google's first on the list.

  6. Linux more popular than Microsoft by updog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is kinda interesting, although I've seen this before. Heh, FTP is more popular that Microsoft too :) I wonder if this type of thing scares Microsoft... Google Top Technology Searches: 1. mp3 2. sms 3. winzip 4. linux 5. ftp 6. dell 7. xbox 8. realplayer 9. microsoft 10. java

    1. Re:Linux more popular than Microsoft by VoiceOfRaisin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      actually thats pretty damn high considering the number of people that probably have microsoft.com as their start page from using IE.

      these results arent very accurate anyways, a lot of people probably only search for things that dont show up at .com. microsoft.com is well known but linux.com and mp3.com may not have what the people were looking for.

  7. Over 30 comments posted... by Malfourmed · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ... and no mention that linux (at #4) outranks microsoft (at #9) on the google technology top 10 list?

    Or is this old news?

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    a world in progress...
  8. Interesting by Z0mb1eman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interesting that Prom Dresses (39) is followed directly by Anorexia (40).

    Coincidence?

    Probably.

    --
    ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
  9. Yahoo! by foo1752 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yahoo! gathers these same search statistics on a weekly basis. You can check it out here. They've also compiled the total 2002 results here. Of course, their results aren't really much different from everyone elses.

  10. Re:Woe as me by il_diablo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Although drawing such conclusions is tempting, I have to play Devil's advocate. (As a side note, I agree that many people are mush-brained morons).

    These are site engine searches. It's entirely possible that people are getting their information from directly entering a site's URL. After all, how often does one do a search for "CNN" or some such? News portals provide exactly that, one place to get news, (hopefully unbiased, but THAT'S a different thread) so that one doesn't need Lycos to find information.

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    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
  11. good joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    sex as No1 excluded? no, I guess it means that all searchterms associated with sex are excluded as well, like No2 porn, No3 horny teens, No4 cumshots, ... and the other 200 topsearched words before Dragonball finally shows up.

    - t

  12. Re:Woe as me by TeddyR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Think of who the driving forces on the internet are today.... excluding the sex factor (which actually is relevant...) the major "new" influx of people on the internet are the 12-22 year olds that take their broadband access for granted.

    There are millions of college students who are entering "wired" dorms and campuses that give them huge amounts of bandwidth to download stuff... so their interests would definitly show up as a factor in the results...

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    Time is on my side
  13. Don't be alarmed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seeing the high scoring searches may give a gloomy outlook towards the future of civilization but don't worry. Only stupid people would be using lycos and that skews the results a bit. Kind of like how the police take their seatbelt usage samples /at the roadblocks/ and claim their efforts increase seatbelt usage.

  14. What about google? by autopr0n · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You know its weird, google has so much more traffic then Lycos, and they are the ones who coined the term 'Zeitgeist' to refer to perotic web-search stats reports. (I.e the 'Google Zeitgeist'). In fact, Google just released their Zeitgeist for 2k2 a couple days ago, but I've been seeing the Lycos thing all over the place.

    I guess Terra-Lycos, being a true media company rather then search-only knows how to play the PR game better. Ah well.

    Ah well. Typing the term 'zeitgeist' over and over has really messed with my head...

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    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  15. Slashdot version? by alfredw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just a thought on a cool Slashcode idea... Track trends on /.! The google graph for the "Las Ketchup" craze has inspired me... Could we track the first occurances, and subsequent uptake/getting-oldness of various /. trends? The first "first post!!!", the height of goatse-ism, the birth of "IN SOVIET RUSSIA"?

    I'd be amused :-)

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    In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
  16. A list of similar tools... by dekraved · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...can be found on my site, http://metabuzz.kushaldave.com. There's also a tool that puts up the different lists side-by-side, though it's a bit broken at the moment. I know self-promotion is always suspect, but I think people interested in things like Zeitgeist will find the list useful.

  17. Google holiday logos by WesG · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As I was reading the Google Zeitgeist I came across a link to the various logos that Google has used during various holidays and events throughout the years. I didn't realize how many there were.

    Check it out:
    http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html