Over the last few weeks, we've been watching the quick ascent of emule. In six weeks, that term has gone from zero searches to half the searches needed to make the Lycos 50. What is this emule, anyway?

To find out, we tried going to emule.com. But what we found was an educational resource site that includes a classical poetry database. Doesn't seem like the kind of thing to really get the Internet stirring, does it?

Well, it turns out that eMule searches have nothing to do with poetry at all. Do a further look into the search results for emule and you will discover that emule is also eMule, a hot new open source file-swapping program similar to eDonkey.

According to the program's creators, and a German-to-English translation tool, eMule is superior because it connects to the file-swapping network faster and is better at handling file corruption. eMule is very, very recent. It wasn't even released on the Web until September of this year. That explains why the searches didn't start until six weeks ago.

eMule was created by Germans, so it is no surprise that most of the searches come from Germany. In fact, 38 percent of eMule searches right now are originating in Germany, while only eight percent originate in the United States.

eDonkey, however, is also much more popular in Europe than in the U.S. 30 percent of eDonkey searches come from France, with only 10 percent from the U.S. (and 8 percent from Germany).

Contrast that to another popular file-swapping program, Morpheus. 70 percent of Morpheus searches come from North America, which is still fewer than the average for all Lycos searches. (We estimate that 80 percent of total searches come from North America.)

Here's a list of last week's top 12 file-swapping programs searched on Lycos. Compare that to the Bonus List on this page from one year ago. The rank last year is in parentheses.

1) KaZaA (4)
2) Morpheus (1)
3) WinMX (5)
4) eDonkey (11)
5) Napster (2)
6) iMesh (7)
7) eMule (-)
8) Direct Connect (-)
9) Bearshare (10)
10) Limewire (9)
11) Audiogalaxy (3)
12) Grokster (-)