Mardi Gras is one of the most popular topics online each year, and this year is no exception, as the holiday reached #3 on the Lycos 50. Here's a closer look at the many searches we get for Mardi Gras.
Many Mardi Gras searches are adult-oriented, thanks to the tradition of women flashing their breasts for beads. Unlike the usual Lycos 50, we haven't filtered out the adult queries for this article. Adult-oriented searches represent 16.9 percent of Mardi Gras queries.
Here are the top specific queries, with the percentages of Mardi Gras searches devoted to each subject:
1) 23.2% Mardi Gras pictures
2) 10.1% Mardi Gras flashers
3) 5.4% Mardi Gras webcam
4) 2.4% Mardi Gras history
5) 2.0% Mardi Gras breasts
6) 1.2% Mardi Gras girls
7) 1.1% Mardi Gras beads
8) 0.7% Mardi Gras recipes
9) 0.6% Mardi Gras video
10) 0.4% Mardi Gras masks
As you can see, the adult stuff is quite big, but we also received a number of searches that were more kid-oriented, including Mardi Gras history and Mardi Gras lesson plans. It also seems a lot of Lycos users planned Mardi Gras celebrations at home, searching for recipes and masks.
Mardi Gras is a very food-oriented holiday, of course. Everyone wants to stuff as much fat in his or her body as possible before Lent. Searches for pancakes, for example, were up 160 percent last week, thanks to pancake breakfasts on Shrove/Fat Tuesday. We also saw searches for traditional pastries like king cakes (as popular last week as Sesame Street) and the Polish delicacy paczki (as popular as best supporting actor nominee Benicio del Toro).
Mardi Gras is apparently quite hard to spell; 10 percent of searches for the holiday were misspellings. The most popular misspellings:
1) 3.2% Mardis Gras
2) 3.0% Marti Gras
3) 1.8% Mardi Gra
4) 0.5% Mardi Grass
5) 0.3% Mardi Grais
Most attention at Mardi Gras is paid to New Orleans, but that isn't the only place with a Mardi Gras celebration. Here are eight other Mardi Gras locations that received searches last week, in order of popularity:
1) Austin, TX
2) Seattle
3) Rio
4) Sydney
5) France
6) Galveston, TX
7) Philadelphia
8) San Luis Obispo, CA
Of course, Mardi Gras in Rio is known as Carnaval. Carnaval received about 18 percent as many searches as Mardi Gras this week, and many fewer adult searches in comparison. 4 percent of Carnaval searches asked for another popular Carnaval, in Trinidad and Tobago.
Mardi Gras may be over for this year, but you can relive all the fun all year round. clubs has photos and video from Mardi Gras 2001, plus chats devoted to the sins that Mardi Gras celebrates. Plus, Terra has sites devoted to both Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnaval in Brazil.
TOMORROW: The new Lycos 50: can interest in the San Diego school shooting overpower Dale Earnhardt nostalgia?
