Taking the pulse on web searches.

Over the years numerous sites have offered us a glimpse into our searching habits. I last took a look at a couple of these exactly four years ago. Back then I listed two sites. Of these, Searchterms.com seems to have disappeared, but the Lycos 50 is still going strong. Google Zeitgeist has become a contender since then, but though I almost always prefer things Google, in this particular case, I prefer what Lycos does.

But more than anything else, the Lycos 50 shows us what stiff competition Janet Jackson has for the ongoing top spot of searches (and it's not Abraham Lincoln, sneaking in at #50, almost the only non-popular culture icon to make the list). People are searching for ... well, I'd like to call it a wide variety of terms, but quite frankly, they're not. They're searching for:

Paris Hilton
Britney Spears
Pamela Anderson (I sort of did that too) and
Jennifer Lopez

And they want to know about:

Pokemon
Dragonball
WWF and
Las Vegas

and lots of other names, some that are familiar to me, and many that I don't even recognize. Almost all of the names listed above have starred on the Lycos list for many weeks, some for years. They're apparently what people are looking for on the web.

Go to: All that technology for ... that?