Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who's causing such a ruckus in Miami, debuts at #37 on this week's Lycos 50. User searches for Gonzalez more than doubled in the last two weeks as Elian's father arrived in the U.S. and political wrangling over the 6-year-old reached boards pitch.
Interesting note: 27% of all searchers simply entered "Elian." (You know you're a hot topic when you're on a first-name basis with the entire country.) Another 23% of searchers misspelled his last name as "Gonzales," with about 50% using both names and getting them right.
Other key points from this week's Lycos 50:
CRASH? WHAT CRASH? Odd but true: last week's stock market craziness caused barely a blip on our search results. Searches for stock and stock quotes were up a tad, about 3%, while stock market quotes was actually down 10%. Nasdaq had no change. Queries for stock market crash were up 10%, but the volume was very low -- car crashes got more searches.
You can look at it two ways: either Web users have grown completely blase about the market's ups and downs -- or else they were too busy watching their stock tickers to search for anything else.
GNU WHO? What is Gnutella (#27)? It's an open-source version of Napster (#15), the MP3-sharing tool that's been all the rage this year. Gnutella was made public briefly a month ago, then pulled offline -- but not before a lot of web denizens had made copies. Now other audiophiles are searching the web, looking for copies of Gnutella they can copy themselves.
TAX TIME: You'd think that the week ending April 15 tax queries would be at the top of our list. Not so: the IRS is at its highest spot ever, #3, while all other tax queries combined rank at #5. Put the two together and they'd be a solid second place, but still about 20% short of Pokemon. As popular as the Japanese critters are, perhaps that old saying should be revised to read "death, taxes and Pokemon."
Speaking of death, capital punishment moves to its highest rank ever this week: #25. We still don't know the reason, but election-year politics seems to be the driving force.
THE MOST-SEARCHED GENERATION: First it was the Holocaust and Hitler, and this week World War Two (#38) makes the Lycos 50. What's going on? All three topics began rising in late January and have been up ever since. That make us think this is academic stuff, probably students hitting the mid-20th century in their history courses.
SHORT SUBJECTS: Pamela Anderson falls all the way to #10 this week -- will #20 be next? We can only hope... Easter crafts, Easter bunny, Easter eggs and Easter pictures are the four most popular Easter queries... William Shakespeare is at #22, his highest ranking ever, and we're seeing more searches for play titles like Romeo & Juliet and Othello... excitement over 2000 draft pushed the NFL to #29... prom dresses dipped a bit, but prom hairstyles actually moves up to #45 this week... April 15 is the 88th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.
NEW THIS WEEK: Gnutella, the NFL, Elian Gonzalez, World War II, Titanic.
DROPOUTS: Actress Carmen Electra, lady wrassler Sable, volcanoes, golf tournament The Masters, music group The Bloodhound Gang.
BIGGEST RISE: Capital punishment, up 12 spots to #25.
BIGGEST DROP: Spring Break, down 17 to #40.
FINAL FACTOID: Lord of the Rings is bidding to become the next big online fad. The first movie in the trilogy isn't due in theaters until December 2001, but filming is underway and fans are already flocking online in a very Star Wars-y way. The frenzy over last week's release of an online trailer nearly pushed LOTR into the Lycos 50.
