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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."

8 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. 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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  2. 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.

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  3. 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

  4. Interesting by Z0mb1eman · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    Coincidence?

    Probably.

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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. 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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