The Lycos 50 - Tracking pop culture, one search at a time.

Beyond a shadow of a bad botox injection, Pam Anderson (#1) reigns supreme as the most- searched person, place or thing for the past 10 years. We call Pamela Anderson "the patron saint" of the Lycos 50. She's stayed in the top 20 nearly every week despite the fact that she's stopped making movies, she doesn't really appear in Playboy anymore and her TV show "Stacked" has had mediocre ratings. What gives Pam the staying power to land in our top 10 nearly each week, making her the ultimate web icon? Is it her breakthrough role on Home Improvement, her film Barb Wire or her series on Babe watch, ahem, Baywatch?

Nope. The piece if video of Pam Anderson that changed the web forever and secured her position as the most popular search query for the past decade was the Tommy Lee and Pam sex video. Anderson first married the drummer of Motley Crue in 1995 after knowing him for only 96 hours, and subsequently had two sons, Brandon and Dylan. But it was the sex video that changed everything. While married, Lee and Anderson filmed a video memento of their love. This video immediately surfaced on the web, and eventually became one of the most popular videos of all time. The couple sued the film's distributor, but settled out of court. Incidentally, this sex-capade video turned into a career craze for a select gang of women (i.e. Paris Hilton, Michelle Vieth, etc.)

In March 2002, Anderson publicly stated that she had contracted the Hepatitis C virus from Lee (supposedly from sharing tattoo needles) and subsequently became a celebrity spokesperson for the American Liver Foundation. Now, Anderson primarily focuses her celebrity power, often causing a stir, acting on behalf of the organization PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

In honor of the 10- year birthday of Lycos, we have spent our vacation with a calculator in hand as we tallied up the most popular search terms for the past decade. Dragonball (#2) hit number one on the Lycos 50 in January 2000 and then held the top spot for 25 out of the 52 weeks of the year. Only holidays, celebrity deaths, and the terrorist attacks of September 11 (#9) could knock Dragonball out of the top spot. Dragonball, the Japanese cartoon merchandising behemoth with movies, videos, games, action figures comic books, and more, remained the number one most popular term for 2001.

The biggest September 11th-related topic for 2001 was Osama bin Laden (#42), who topped the Lycos 50 for five weeks after receiving very few searches prior to the attacks on America. Since the attacks, searches for most Sept. 11-related topics have fallen off our list, except for September 11th itself, which has stayed strong year after year.

However, Bin Laden wasn't the largest one-week search related to Sept. 11. That award goes to the 16th century French seer Nostradamus (#47), thanks to a hoax prophecy attributed to him that predicted the Twin Towers disaster. Nostradamus, the 16th-century French seer, has landed on the Lycos 50 three times, but each time for something had he actually written. The first time, he hit number 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 number one because of a hoax email that claimed he predicted the September 11 attacks. Nostradamus received more searches that week ending September 15, 2001 than any other subject in any one week since we first began the Lycos 50. Finally, following the death of Pope John Paul II, web users once again searched for Nostradamus' predictions of who would become the next Pope and prophesies regarding Pope John Paul II's successor. Incidentally Nostradamus has been misspelled in more than 100 ways and received twice as many searches as all the election queries combined in the week following the 2004 election.

American Idol is the only reality TV show to nearly make an entree on this list. The reality show trend which started at the beginning of the new millennium following the success of Survivor and Big Brother, begat a multitude of mutations but non as powerful online as the ultimate star search show. The idol that most captivates users online remains Clay Aiken. Cue the Clay-niacs...

TOMORROW: Star Trek will not be ignored...

Dean Tsouvalas can be reached at The_Lycos_50@lycos-inc.com