Baseball's a hit, carbohydrates burn out, dope floats and Beanie Babies sag -- all this and more on this week's Lycos 50. (The new rankings are on your left.) Some notes on the movers and shakers:
CATCH IT: Baseball fever has arrived. The national pastime makes its first-ever appearance on our search charts this week, debuting at an impressive #19 as the divisional and league playoffs hit full stride. Hot baseball queries include scores, statistics, pictures and World Series tickets.
CARBOS COOL: Last week's Oprah-inspired rush on carbohydrate "addiction" has slowed. Carbohydrates drop three slots to #38, Oprah drops five to #25, and Dr. Atkins and his low-carbo diet drop 16 places to #35.
DROPOUTS: Cindy Margolis, Barbie, rugby, dogs, Australia.
NEW THIS WEEK: Baseball, Christopher Columbus.
BACK AFTER A SHORT ABSENCE: Titanic, Alyssa Milano and the IRS.
BIGGEST RISE: Wrestling is up 17, marijuana up 12, Mariah Carey up 8.
BIGGEST DROP: The Atkins Diet and Melissa Joan Hart drop 16 places. Beanie Babies drop 14 as the buzz from their big retirement announcement fades.
MOVEMENT: 28 terms move up, 16 move down, and 6 are unchanged.
MYSTERY OF THE WEEK: Marijuana is making some kind of strange, aggressive run up the charts. For weeks it's been lurking around #50, but last week it suddenly jumped to #38. This week it's up another 12 spots to #26. What's going on? Among the search terms paired with marijuana: seeds, legalization, medicinal, and growing.
DRESSED FOR SUCCESS: Costumes is proving to be the most popular of all Halloween-related queries. (Witches are also holding their own at #43.) Standing alone, costumes would be about as popular as #39 Korn.
THE POWER OF 19. As noted, this week's highest debut is baseball at #19. Last week the highest debut was the Atkins Diet -- also at #19.
COLUMBUS ARRIVES LATE: Christopher Columbus makes his first appearance this week, thanks to Columbus Day. Oddly, his popularity rose the week after, rather than the week before, the holiday.
DOGS DEPART: After much deliberation, we've stopped including dogs in the Lycos 50. We've decided that, like cars and weather, dogs is a general term which covers too much territory to really compare with other, more volatile, terms.
MOVIES WEAK: The fall doldrums must be here for the movie business. The only flicks to crack this week's Lycos 50 are two from the spring -- Star Wars and The Matrix -- and 1997's Titanic. (The latter, of course, also includes queries from surfers researching the ship itself.)
AIR WARS: Queries for airline tickets took a big jump this week. In fact, if we included them on the Lycos 50 they'd rank at #22, just above Beanie Babies. (See our FAQ for details of what we do and don't include.) We'll track airline ticket requests in this space for the next several weeks to see if we can determine the precise highest moment of holiday ticket frenzy.
Y2K FLOP? This week 50% more users were worried about their tattoos than about Y2K. Perhaps it's time to admit that the Y2K bug isn't really scaring the general population?
