If you are looking for hacker material on the net, you may want to dip your pinky towards the bottom left of your keyboard. You are going to be using a lot of "z."
For example, one of the most popular generic queries on Lycos is for warez. Last week, warez got as many searches as dogs or horoscopes.
Warez is a computer hacker term. According to the Lycos Tech Glossary, the word warez refers to commercial software that has been pirated and made available to the public via the Internet.
Not content with adjusting the end of the word "software" for their nefarious uses, online hackers have put the sign of the "z" on a number of other computer terms. If you are looking for applications, we get five times as many searches for appz than we do for apps, and we get twice as many searches for programz than we do for programs.
In other cases, the "z" plural gets plenty of regular searches, but not as many as the more conventional "s" plural. For example, gamez is nowhere near as common as the more popular games, but it still gets as many searches a week as Pottery Barn. Other examples in this category would be moviez (5 percent of the more popular movies) and crackz (30 percent of the more popular cracks; a crack is a bypass of copy protection).
We know what you're saying -- what in the name of Zeus is going on with all these misspelled words? It seems that for the Internet generation, "z" has replaced "s" as the plural letter of choice.
Z is not just for computers - it is all over music searches as well. We've got rapper Jay-Z, English rap-rock mishmash Gorillaz, and of course the best-selling rap-metal group Limp Bizkit. We also get plenty of searches for both the Malaysian singer Ziana Zain and the French soccer star Zinedine Zidane.
No article about the power of "z" can be complete without a mention of one of 2001's funniest web fads, the white rappers Icy Hot Stuntaz. Fake or real -- who can be sure?
As for the man who originally made the sign of the "z," Zorro got as many searches last week as the drug Zanaflex or zebra print rugs.
MONDAY: The Simpsons are going to Delaware!
