D.U.I Don't Care
Guest Commentator: Aaron SchatzElection 2000 is this week's hottest web topic, but the week's big political story made hardly a ripple with Lycos users.
The revelation of George W. Bush's 1976 DUI arrest (and his 1998 lie about the incident to a Dallas reporter) produced almost no waves online: less than 1% of Bush searches mentioned the story. (More people were interested in Bushdance.com, a Hamster Dance knockoff which was the subject of 3% of Bush searches.) Our tally ended Saturday night, giving users only two days to search after the DUI story broke on Friday, but even so we saw remarkably weak interest in the topic.
The two major presidential candidates each drop one slot, but both remain extremely popular with Lycos users. Democrat Al Gore actually put a slight amount of distance between himself and of Bush, rising by about two percent (51.9% to 48.1% when measured head-to-head).
The #1 term, Election 2000, includes searches for elections, the electoral college, voting, and presidential polls. The Electoral College was a particularly hot topic: counted on its own it would have ranked #12 on this week's list.
Green Party candidate Ralph Nader leaps to #25 this week. In a three-way comparison with the major candidates, Nader gets 16.3 % of user searches compared with 43.5% for Gore and 40.2% for Bush. More astonishing was the number of searches for the Green Party itself, which nearly out-polled searches for the Democratic Party.
Nader and the Greens may have an advantage online because their natural constituencies include college students and young technology workers. Still, Lycos users seemed to suggest that Nader's support isn't going anywhere before today's election.
The election also leads to the first ever appearance on the Lycos 50 this week by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh (#42). Traffic to Limbaugh's website has grown substantially in recent weeks as GOP partisans seek out election information.
Other key points from this week's Lycos 50:
HALLOWEEN HOT: Halloween (#4) fell right in the middle of week, keeping it high on our list. Pumpkin carving (#7) jumped in popularity while costumes (#13) fell, which seems to suggest that last-minute Jack-O-Lantern carving is more popular than last-minute costume shopping. Ghosts (#30) also made their first appearance on the Lycos 50; about one-third of ghost searches were for ghost stories.
Other popular Halloween-related searches include the related Mexican holiday Day of the Dead (#17), witchcraft (#32), and poet Edgar Allan Poe (#48). Wicca just missed the list at #51, while Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows continued to be remarkably unpopular compared to its predecessor.
With Halloween now out of the way, other fall holidays begin to rise in popularity. Christmas rises to #10, and Thanksgiving debuts at #12.
BACKSTREET BURNOUT?: What is going on with the Backstreet Boys? Once again, pop music's #2 boy band fell out of the Lycos 50 despite a new album, Black and Blue, only two weeks from release. The Backstreet Boys were on top of rivals 'N Sync (#24) for the first six months of our rankings, but 'N Sync passed them on February 8, six weeks before the release of their album, and they remain hugely popular while Backstreet fever seems to have subsided. Album sales will tell the tale, but 'N Sync seems to have stolen the hearts of American teenagers away from their boy band predecessors.
SHORT SUBJECTS: Napster (#3) searches exploded again after the online music site announced a deal with media conglomerate Bertelsmann that may lead to the swapping site becoming a paid service? Anthony Dwain Lee (#43) is the actor who was shot by Los Angeles police at a Halloween party when they mistook his plastic toy gun for a real .357 magnum? Red Alert 2 (#49), released last week, is a new military videogame in the Command and Conquer series? Anna Kournikova (#38) returns, either thanks to or in spite of an appearance in the final of the Kremlin Cup tournament? Britney Spears (#6) drops out of the top five for the first time ever? The Olympics finally drop out of the Lycos 50, where they will stay until we get ready for Salt Lake City in 2002.
NEW THIS WEEK: Thanksgiving, ghosts, Carmen Electra, Anna Kournikova, Rush Limbaugh, Anthony Dwain Lee, basketball, wrestler/pinup girl Chyna, Red Alert 2.
DROPOUTS: Baseball, the death penalty, the Olympics, Hindu holiday Diwali, Howard Stern, the Israel-Palestine conflict, Madonna, Backstreet Boys, William Shakespeare.
BIGGEST RISE: Ralph Nader, up 15 places to #25.
BIGGEST DROP: Paula Jones, down 27 places to #35.
ANGEL WATCH: Lucy Liu proves to be the most popular of Charlie's Angels. In a three-way race with her co-stars, she gets 35.4% of searches, with 33.7% searching for Drew Barrymore and 30.9% looking for the movie's biggest name, Cameron Diaz. Bill "Bosley" Murray finishes a distant fourth. | 
