One of the most popular regular searches on Lycos is for biographies. We thought we would take a look today at whose lives are of most interest to Lycos users.
Biography searches change significantly from month to month depending on what is in the news as well as what students are studying. To show how this is the case, we've taken the list of top ten biographies from three different weeks over the past year.
First, here's the list from last week:
1) William Shakespeare
2) Adolf Hitler
3) Michael Jordan
4) Mark Twain
5) Bill Gates
6) Pablo Picasso
7) Walt Disney
8) Maya Angelou
9) Edgar Allan Poe
10) Leonardo Da Vinci
That's a good mix of modern celebrities and historical figures. Now take a look at the list for the week ending February 17, and you can see the effect of both Black History Month and President's Day:
1) William Shakespeare
2) Michael Jordan
3) George Washington
4) Harriet Tubman
5) Malcolm X
6) Rosa Parks
7) Bill Gates
8) Walt Disney
9) Henry Ford
10) Mark Twain
A surprising omission from this list is Martin Luther King, who gets enough searches to make the Lycos 50 during January and February but not for his biography, strangely enough.
Go back to the week ending October 7, and it is no surprise we were in the middle of a presidential race, and we had just finished the Olympics:
1) Al Gore
2) Walt Disney
3) William Shakespeare
4) George W. Bush
5) Thomas Jefferson
6) Bill Gates
7) Jennifer Lopez
8) Mia Hamm
9) Michael Jordan
10) George Washington
You don't hear from Al Gore much these days, but that George W. Bush guy hasn't gone away. He actually would be #13 on the list ending last week and #12 on the list ending February 17.
There are a few biographies that are always the subject of searches: William Shakespeare, of course, and Bill Gates. The constant searches for Michael Jordan's biography are just another indication of how popular he is, by far more popular than any active basketball player.
You can tell also from looking at these lists how studying history develops over the school year, with searches for our founding fathers in October (Jefferson, Washington) and searches for twentieth century figures in April (Hitler, Picasso).
There is one name here that is really surprising, however. We know Disney entertainment is hot, but who would have figured that Walt himself has one of the consistently most-searched biographies online?
MONDAY: Bard of the tech downturn.
