Yes, it's true -- the first-ever online countdown of popular Internet topics turns three years old tomorrow. Our first article, written by Fritz Holznagel, appeared on August 30, 1999.

Things were a bit different back then. Since we hadn't completely set our system, a few generic terms appeared on the Lycos 50 that we no longer include. That article highlighted rising topics including Hurricane Dennis, singer Sophie B. Hawkins, and the late wrestling promotion ECW.

But some things are the same. 11 terms from that first list are on the Lycos 50 this week, including #43 Pokemon (which was #1 that week) and #3 Dragonball (which was #11 that week, the only time it has ever finished below the top ten).

In honor of our third anniversary, we thought it would be fun to go back and look not at the most popular searches of our three years, but rather the strangest searches of our three years. Here is a subjective look at the ten oddest topics to appear on the Lycos 50.

10) NOSTRADAMUS
Peak: #1, September 2001

The 16th-century French seer has been on the Lycos 50 twice, but neither time for something he actually wrote. The first time, he hit #32 due to a hoax email that claimed he wrote a quatrain that predicted the election of George W. Bush, kindly referred to as the "village idiot." The second time, he spent nine weeks on the list and two at #1 because of a hoax email that claimed he predicted the September 11 attacks.

What makes Nostradamus worthy of inclusion on this list is not the fact that he made the Lycos 50, but rather how many searches he got. In the week of September 9-15, 2001, Nostradamus received more searches in one week than any other subject in the history of the Lycos 50 and was misspelled in more than 100 ways. The fact that this hoax email, and not the World Trade Center or Osama bin Laden, received the most searches after the terrorist attack on America says a lot about the speed at which hoax and folklore emails race across the Internet.

9) IT/GINGER/SEGWAY
Peak: #3, December 2001

In the middle of January, 2001, word rapidly spread across the Internet about an invention that would revolutionize the world -- but nobody knew what it was. Searches for the unknown device, known alternately as IT or Ginger, reached #4 on the Lycos 50, and inventor Dean Kamen hit #10. Was it a car that would run on water? A pollution-free engine? Or just a scooter?

The answer, as revealed in December, leaned towards "just a scooter." Nevertheless, the final unveiling of Kamen's Segway Human Transport put the machine back on the Lycos 50 at #3. And after that, instead of changing the world, it promptly disappeared. Or have you seen a number of Segways on the sidewalks of your town lately?

8) MOON LANDING
Peak: #23, March 2001

I know what you're saying, wasn't this 33 years ago? Well, it was, but the NASA moon landing actually made the Lycos 50 in March 2001 thanks to the FOX special Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?. The special claimed that the moon landing was just a film set in the Nevada desert, a fake used by the government to pull the wool over the eyes of an unsuspecting public.

The fact that people would go looking for information proving that the moon landing was faked is bizarre, but what makes the searches for the special even more bizarre is that the March airing was a re-run. Yet the re-run got 60 percent more searches than the original airing six weeks prior.

7) NOCALLSPLEASE.COM
Peak: #37, August 2002

It makes sense that we would get a lot of searches for a website that allows you to block telemarketers from calling your house. What's amazing about this is that www.nocallsplease.com was specific to citizens of the state of Pennsylvania -- yet it made the Lycos 50.

6) Q33NY
Peak: #25, September 2001

So many hoaxes went around the Internet in the wake of the September attacks that it is hard to pick just one as the most unusual. But we're not sure anything beats Q33NY, the alleged conspiracy hidden within Microsoft Word.

Yes, it is true that typing "Q33NY" into the Wingdings font on Word produces pictures of an airplane, two images that sort of look like buildings, a skull and crossbones, and then the Star of David. But Q33 was not one of the flight numbers for the hijacked airplanes, and it wasn't a reference to a Quranic verse. It just so happened that "N" was a skull and "Y" was a Star of David. Hey, they had to make something the skull, right?

5) BERT IS EVIL
Peak: #29, October 2001

OK, maybe this one is stranger. In mid-October, a picture of Sesame Street's Bert was discovered on a poster held by a Bangladeshi protester extolling the virtues of bin Laden. Turns out that the protester had stolen the photo from a joking website called Bert is Evil, which used doctored photos of the Muppet with various bad guys to prove he was trying to take over the world. The bin Laden supporter, lacking Muppet savvy, forgot to cut Bert out of the photo. Perhaps one of the all-time greatest examples of truth imitating fiction.

4) MLIFE
Peak: #16, February 2002

If AT&T Wireless was trying to get people talking with their information-less ad campaign featuring the slogan "mlife," it succeeded. Numerous Super Bowl commercials made mlife the first unintelligible slogan on the Lycos 50. Too bad people found out that "mlife" just meant "mobile phone service."

3) CLAIRE SWIRE
Peak: #3, December 2000

Perhaps the ultimate lesson in being careful what you write in your email. A young London marketing executive wrote to her boyfriend describing how much she enjoyed pleasuring him, only to find her kinky thoughts sent all over the world and posted across the Internet. This is what happens when your boyfriend emails some friends, who forward to their friends, who forward to their friends, and on and on.

When the email first showed up, Swire made it to #20 and we thought, "This is funny." The next week, Swire climbed to #3 and we thought, "This is really, really sad. And yet, funny." For one week in December 2000, this poor, unknown woman found herself hotter online than Britney Spears. All because she found it yummy.

2) ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
Peak: #36, March 2001

Seven words that shook the world! This mangled English translation of a phrase from the 1989 Japanese video game Zero Wing was so bizarre we gave it its own article just to try to explain the phenomenon. It's strange enough for three words together to get that many searches, let alone seven.

For two months, the Internet was filled with doctored photos showing the phrase everywhere from Times Square to driver's licenses. All Your Base was offered for sale on eBay. A song and music video were produced. And garbled grammar reigned supreme throughout the land.

1) CHU MEI-FENG
Peak: #1, January 2002

Claire Swire was fun, but the strangest sex scandal in Lycos 50 history has to be the one revolving around Taiwanese politician Chu Mei-Feng. Copies showed up online of a secretly shot video of her adulterous liaison with a Taiwan businessman. The video was famous after being found on sale in street markets around Southeast Asia.

And that's the strangest part of all: Southeast Asia. Only about 14 percent of searches for the scandal came from Lycos' home in the United States. Lycos was swamped with Chu Mei-Feng searches from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, even Australia and Spain -- and almost none from Taiwan. Furthermore, despite being invisible in the English-speaking world, searches for the scandal just kept going and going. Chu topped the Lycos 50 for three weeks and spent 14 weeks on the list in total.

No topic has ever flooded Lycos with quite so much overseas traffic, no topic has ever made such an unexpected visit on the Lycos 50, and none of these oddball topics spent quite that long on our list. That all makes Chu Mei-Feng our strangest topic of all time.

HONORABLE MENTION: Area 51 Photos, Elf Bowling, Face in the Smoke, Hamster Dance, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, Pecan Pie, Popocatepetl.

The Lycos 50 will return Wednesday after Labor Day with a new list. Now move all zig, for great justice!