She's ba-aaack!
Remember Darva Conger, the bride from the Fox TV show Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Her marriage to Rick Rockwell may have been annulled, but the Web is still in love with her. She's back on the Lycos 50 this week at #34.
Seems Conger is scheduled to appear in the altogether in the August issue of Playboy. Already the searches are piling up, many of them searching for "Conger photos."
The moral: on the Web you always get a second helping of your 15 minutes of fame.
Other key points from this week's Lycos 50:
PONDER THY FATHER: Father's Day reaches #5 this week, topping such hotties as Napster (#7) and Pamela Anderson (#8). Dads couldn't crack the record of Mother's Day, though, which topped out at #2 on our list last month.
SPEAKING OF BA-AAACK: Yes, Beanie Babies are also back on our list at #37. You can thank McDonalds, which is running a promo for something called Teenie Beanies. (Sounds more like an appetizer from Taco Bell.) Beanie Babies were last in the Lycos 50 on our January 25th list.
HOT WEATHER, SPORTS HOT: Summer has brought us heavy sports action on the Lycos 50. Golf's U.S. Open hits #13 on our list this week (Tiger Woods mopped up the field) and soccer's Euro 2000 is even higher at #9. Also new this week: soccer (#40).
Add golf (#12), baseball (#19), skateboarding (#30), the NBA (#28), Nascar (#32) and the Olympics (#49), and 9 of the top 50 items are sports-related.
SOME LIKE IT HOT: On June 13 the American Film Institute announced its list of the top 100 comedies of all time. No big deal, right? Wrong. Web users loved it, pushing the AFI to #48 on this week's list. (Half the searchers must have been people wondering how in the world Tootsie could have been named the #2 comedy of all time.)
NEW THIS WEEK: The U.S. Open, Darva Conger, Beanie Babies, Soccer, the IRS, the American Film Institute.
DROPOUTS: Mission: Impossible 2, Gladiator, golf clubs, Shannon Elizabeth, Howard Stern, the Atkins Diet.
BIGGEST RISE: CBS TV series Survivor, up 18 spots to #18.
BIGGEST DROP: Rock band Metallica, down 15 places to #33.
AND FINALLY: You'd think with all the hoo-rah over missing atomic secrets the Web would be flooded with searches on the topic. Not so: our scan of the top 200,000 queries last week revealed only a few hundred queries for Los Alamos and no queries for "nuclear secrets" or "atomic secrets." (The most popular "atomic" query was for atomic clock.) For better or worse, people just don't seem interested in this story.
