That's what Dan Rather called it this morning as I flipped through six different news channels. Perhaps the best description I heard.
We've run special numbers this morning which reflect all searches between midnight and noon EDT, September 11.
The top term during this period was CNN. Searches for CNN came in at about 160 times their usual frequency over a 12-hour period. Since most of those searches probably came in during a three-hour period, 9am to noon, the frequency was actually more like 640 times normal.
Lycos News has updated news on all the horrifying events.
Here is an unedited list of the top ten search terms between noon and midnight on September 11. Unlike the usual Lycos 50, this list has not been edited to combine misspellings:
CNN
News
World Trade Center
CNN News
CNN.com
MSNBC
ABC News
BBC
Breaking News
World News
Here is a list of the top ten searches for specific items, not including news organizations. Once again, different spellings (such as Pentagon and The Pentagon) are not combined:
World Trade Center
Whitney Houston
Pentagon
World Trade Centre
Bin Laden
World Trade Center New York
Osama Bin Laden
American Airlines
Camp David
Nostradamus
Why Whitney Houston? Apparently, she was absent from last night's special Michael Jackson concert and rumors went around that she's back in rehab. At 9am this morning, of course, that became trivial. As for Nostradamus, I suppose people were looking to see if he ever predicted a terrorist attack such as this.
To put the searches from today in some sort of context, the term CNN -- not including CNN News, or CNN.com, or anything else CNN -- received 61 times as many searches over the past 12 hours as the usual #1 term Dragonball.
Here are some other subjects getting a number of searches today:
Pearl Harbor
Taliban
American Red Cross
Torres Gemelas (Spanish for "Twin Towers")
America Under Attack
Black September (PLO terrorists who attacked the 1972 Olympics)
We'll be back with more when we get more. In the meantime, I hope all are well, and your families are well.
Now we all know what it feels like to be Israeli.
Click here for today's original Lycos 50 report, with the commentary on the new Lycos 50 ending September 8, 2001.
