Slashdot Mirror
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."
You mean to tell me that dragonball has nothing to do with sex?
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
If all goes well... we should see something like this:
Sex - Find It
I would have shlopped Britney in there with the sex searches... There's no way she's number 4 without the slashdot crowd's celebrity nude searches.
Xavodim.com
CNN has a story about Lycos and its 50 top "searched for items of the year.
Wow, are there people searching using Lycos?
Tat Tvam Asi
Wow, the world is much geekier than i thought.
however, when I want info about dragonball, I normally just search for '68000'.
The real news to me in this story is that Lycos still exists.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
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?
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.
I worked hard ALL year to get "Wild Donkey Bestialty Porn" to the top 10 search terms, only to have CNN factor it OUT of the statistics.
What google neglected to mention was the words the top search words were teamed up with: ...
...
...
...
...
...
2. "shakira" with "will compiling my own kernel get me ass like that"
3. "winter olympics" with "I can see your privates through that luge outfit"
5. "avril lavigne" with "what if i am attracted to a singer that looks like my daughter"
6. "star wars" with "askjeeves: will the next one suck?"
7. "eminem" with "hyprocritical dirty white skinny guy"
8. "american idol" with "please god kill me I watched it "
11. "natalie portman" with "candid nipple pics"
13. "trillian" with "when will this actually work properly"
15. "neverwinter nights" with "linux client when ??"
20. "ikea" with "crazy swedes"
Ask Jeeves also posted year-end search trends, but it picked different information to highlight than either Lycos or Google.
Yearly: 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: 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.
The shareholder is always right.
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
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.
Why? Sexual content is no less valid than any other form of expression. It's obviously popular -- why isn't it represented equally in the study?
It's an obvious form of media bias -- a slur against the so-called "adult" industry. It's hipocracy -- children can see guns and violence at an early age, but people without clothes, or worse, humans having sex is "bad" for them.
I decry this media bias. It's clearly a conspiracy by the Storks and their Baby Delivery Monopoly.
--
AC
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.
How about the biggest declines? Boy bands. nSync down from 36 to 163, and Back Street Boys tumble to 250 from 58.
While this might look like good news, it's not. It only means that cultural space is being made for even stupider things.
Is it fascism yet?
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.
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...
--
Time is on my side
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...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Chu Mei-Feng isn't a guy, it's a woman. A taiwanese Politictian who had a huge sex scandal in Taiwan.
.mpg files of her getting fucked.
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
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!