The nation this week had to decide which was more frightening: the playful horror of Halloween (#2), the (maybe) danger of anthrax (#3), or our nation's professed enemy, Osama Bin Laden (#1).
Bin Laden ends up at #1 for the first time, but anthrax was the big mover this week, with searches up more than 600 percent. While it is a bit of a surprise that anthrax doesn't take the top spot, the range of searches for disease is astonishing. Lycos users searched for anthrax symptoms, anthrax vaccines, and anthrax in Florida.
It seems like the antibiotic Cipro is gaining ground on gas masks (#50) as the correct way to protect against anthrax infection. Cipro searches were up 500 percent this week, while gas masks nearly fell out of the Lycos 50.
Folks who don't like heavy metal music may not realize that many of the results that come from searches for anthrax (as well as the web address www.anthrax.com) lead to the band Anthrax. The boys of
"the good Anthrax," now in a position they never expected, have produced a press release attempting to clear their name (they're considering changing it to Basket Full of Puppies).
THE BUGS BUNNY OPTION: Much of the nation has decided that the best way to attack Bin Laden is to poke fun at him. This is what Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan have called the "Bugs Bunny Option." Roughly 10 percent of searches for Bin Laden asked for jokesor cartoons. We're partial to this cartoon ourselves.
There are also all the searches for Bin Laden games. The most popular is called Bin Laden Liquors, in which you shoot at a shopkeeper Bin Laden taking hostages in a liquor store.
That doesn't even begin to address what may be the strangest search of the week, for Bin Laden toilet paper. Yes, there is a company making it.
ERNIE IS CRUSHED: And, that strangeness doesn't even approach the strangeness that faced us in mid-week when a picture of Sesame Street's Bert was discovered on a poster held by a Bangladeshi protester extolling the virtues of Bin Laden.
How did a picture of a very angry Bert end up next to Bin Laden? The answer is a long-standing Web in-joke and website called Bert is Evil (#29), which became popular among Lycos searchers this past week. The site "documented" photographic evidence of the Sesame Street character thanks to doctored photos showing Bert hanging out with Hitler, the KKK, and yes, Bin Laden.
It seems that some eager pro-Bin Laden protester, searching the Internet for pictures of his murderous hero, found the Bert is Evil website and neglected to cut the muppet from the photo. Perhaps one of the all time greatest examples of truth imitating fiction.
The creator of the original Bert is Evil site, San Francisco web designer Dino Ignacio, has pulled his page down, but you can still find some versions of the site by searching on Lycos.
THE ARAB CNN: When Bin Laden wants to get the message out, he goes to the Qatar-based all news television network Al-Jazeera (#20). Many of the pictures we've been seeing of the bombing in Afghanistan also come from this network, which has a huge following worldwide thanks to the fact that it is the only Arab broadcast company to have freedom from government censorship.
(For those wondering, yes, we don't normally include news organizations on the Lycos 50, but we feel that Al-Jazeera is an exception because the organization itself is newsworthy. This is what is known to Red Sox fans as "manager's decision.")
MORE WAR: As we noted earlier this week, the start of the bombing didn't get quite as many searches as we expected. Nonetheless, it did cause searches for Afghanistan (#6) and the Taliban (#13) to each double. Just the word war received more searches than either Limp Bizkit or Angelina Jolie.
Click here for page two of today's report, with all the non-war news.
