After September 11, the Lycos 50, like everything else in America, has been fundamentally changed.
Tuesday's terrorist attacks led to a massive search for information never before seen in the history of the Internet. Half of the subjects on this week's Lycos 50 are new this week, and of those subjects all except one are related to the attack on America.
Shocking, then, that the #1 subject is not the World Trade Center (#2) or terror suspect Osama Bin Laden (#3). No, the top subject is 16th century seer Nostradamus, thanks to an email hoax which attributed to him a prophesy foretelling this week's horrors.
I discussed this hoax in last week's special report, but Nostradamus searches actually increased midweek, despite a number of media outlets reporting on its fallacy. So, let's review. The email reads as follows:
In the year of the new century and nine months/From the sky will come a great King of Terror. The sky will burn at 45 degrees (NY is 45). Fire approaches the great new city. In the city of god there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by chaos (Twin Towers), while the fortress endures (Pentagon), the great leader will succumb (Bush "we will find those responsible.")", "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning." - Nostradamus 1654
As the Snopes Urban Legends website points out, Nostradamus died in 1566, so he could not have made a prediction in 1654. This hoax originated with a student at Brock University in Canada in the 1990s, appearing in a web page essay on Nostradamus.
This particular quatrain was offered by the page's author, Neil Marshall, as a fabricated example to illustrate how easily an important-sounding prophecy can be crafted through the use of abstract imagery. He pointed out how the terms he used were so deliberately vague they could be interpreted to fit any number of cataclysmic events. Perhaps it is Neil Marshall, not Nostradamus, who is the true seer.
You may remember that Nostradamus also appeared on the Lycos 50 after the election, thanks to another hoax which had him predicting the election of President Bush (and referring to the President as the "village idiot").
Nostradamus isn't the only soothsayer to appear on the search logs this week. We also received a number of searches for a cult figure named Sollog who claims to have predicted the attack, and searches for the Bible Code were up 450 percent.
THE IMPACT: Statistics, percentages, and numbers can't do justice to the all-encompassing pursuit of news that took place this week. Nonetheless, it is our job to churn those numbers out, so here are some interesting ones.
Nostradamus received more searches in one week than any other subject since we first began the Lycos 50 two years ago. Nostradamus was misspelled in more than 100 ways and received 12.5 times as many searches as former #1 Dragonball, which fell to #8.
We took a look at the previous record-holder for biggest news week, which was the week ending November 14, 2000. That week, the terms Election, Electoral College, and Florida Recount were #1, #2, and #4 respectively. This week, just the World Trade Center received 33 percent more searches than all three of those topics combined during the week following the 2000 election.
If you combine searches for the World Trade Center, terrorism (#5), and the Pentagon (#11), they receive more than 100 times as many searches as the attack on the USS Cole did in its highest week, the week ending October 24, 2000.
PATRIOTISM ASCENDANT: The American flag (#6) appears on the Lycos 50, just as it is appearing all over the United States. Another illustration of patriotism is the circulation over email of an editorial by Canadian broadcaster Gordon Sinclair (#32). The piece, entitled "The Americans," may seem timely in its praises for the United States, but it is not recent. It is the transcription of a broadcast actually made on June 5, 1973. Sinclair himself died in 1984.
THE AIRLINES: Searches for the involved airlines didn't go up much: American Airlines saw searches up 25 percent, while United Airlines only rose by 7 percent. On the other hand, plane manufacturer Boeing saw searches triple and finishes #56.
Click here for page two of today's Lycos 50.
Flag image courtesy nycroads.com.
