Shakespeare, Cliff Notes, and Greek mythology have all been on the Lycos 50 in the last month, evidence that the kids are back in school.
Last fall we ran a search for hot academic terms and found that textbooks, homework and Beowulf were high-volume search terms.
This year let's take a slightly different angle and look at academic terms which have risen the fastest. That is to say, these terms may not be the highest in volume of searches, but they've increased in popularity the greatest percentage in the last month. That indicates, we presume, that they're increasingly hot topics with homework-hungry students.
In rough order of the greatest number of searches, September's fast risers were:
1. Robert Frost
2. Jamestown
3. Grendel
4. The Scarlet Letter
5. Leonardo da Vinci
6. Historia de Mexico
7. State flowers
8. The Old Man and the Sea
9. Alexander Fleming
10. Academic Regalia
11. Odysseus
12. Constantine
13. Octavio Paz
14. Dante Alighieri
15. Thales
If you're keeping score at home, we make that: three poets, two book titles, one city, one country, one floral topic, two literary characters (Odysseus and Grendel), one emperor, one philosopher, one Renaissance man, and one cool penicillin-discoverin' stud.
And then there's academic regalia -- we don't know what that's about.
Props to ancient philosopher Thales, whom we hadn't even heard of until we stumbled across him in our search logs. (He was only the founder of Greek philosophy, don't you know.) In case you're wondering, Thales got about 5% as many searches as Robert Frost, with the rest of the topics spread out inbetween.
The historia de Mexico queries show you just how many Spanish-language queries we get here even on the English-language version of Lycos. (Kids! Use Lycos Mexico!)
State flowers we're presuming is a homework topic for the younger crowd, while Grendel is a villain for the high school set. Meanwhile, it's nice to see that Ernest Hemingway and Nathaniel Hawthorne are still in the mix. (But what -- no Melville?) Jamestown is a little surprising, but we presume that if you're studying Colonial history you begin with the early settlements.
So who says students today aren't reading the classics? Judging from this list we'd say that academics are alive and well online. (Even if Britney Spears did get more searches last week than all of them combined.) Viva la academie!
