A dozen terms have remained on the Lycos 50 every week since last August. They include Pokemon, NASA, Pamela Anderson... and Sin City itself, Las Vegas.
What exactly are all those people looking for in Vegas? To find out we took a gander at the search logs for all of 1999.
Turns out queries for simply "Las Vegas" made up about 75% of all Vegas-related searches. The other queries we found are listed below, from most popular to least. (We tossed in nearby Hoover Dam and Lake Mead just for fun.) Hotel/casino names are marked with an (h). The lineup:
1. Las Vegas real estate
2. Las Vegas vacations
3. Hoover Dam
4. Las Vegas escorts
5. Bellagio (h)
6. Mandalay Bay (h)
7. MGM Grand (h)
8. Hotels in Las Vegas
9. Paris Las Vegas (h)
10. Caesars Palace (h)
11. Las Vegas Review-Journal
12. Las Vegas weddings
13. Vegas odds
14. The Mirage (h)
15. Las Vegas travel
16. Las Vegas weather
17. Los Vegas
18. Lake Mead
19. Las Vegas golf
20. Las Vegas Hilton (h)
21. The Luxor (h)
22. Las Vegas strip
23. Circus Circus (h)
24. The Stardust (h)
25. The Venetian (h)
26. Las Vegas Sun
27. Las Vegas reservations
28. Las Vegas coupons
29. Las Vegas map
"Real estate" at the top is quite a surprise, until you remember that this is America's fastest-growing city. Also surprising is the paucity of gambing terms, "Vegas odds" being the only one. Perhaps gamblers searching for blackjack or craps info have no reason to mention the city.
More people look for specific hotel/casinos than we might have expected. The fancy new spots -- Bellagio, Paris Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay -- got the bulk of the attention there. Old standbys Caesars Palace and the MGM Grand also scored well.
A few other notes: the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper is whipping the rival Sun by a margin of about 2-1. More people were curious about getting married in Vegas than in playing golf there. And at least Hoover Dam got more searches than Vegas escorts.
Finally: about one person in every 150 spells it "Los" Vegas.
Note: Caesars Palace searchers may also have been looking for hotels in Lake Tahoe or Atlantic City. Luxor and Mirage and Stardust all have significant other meanings -- we took a stab and assigned 50% of all such searches to the hotels. Other slight anomalies may have occurred; please do not base your wedding on this list.
