We thought we would take a break from preparing the Best of 2000 lists (which begin next Wednesday) to play around with one of our favorite Lycos 50 topics - the Web's LEAST popular search terms.
Back in March we first took a look at some of those items which get just four or five searches per day. Not the absolute bottom, which consists of things which get just one or two searches in a week, but the bottom of the list of terms which are searched for on a regular basis. Here are a few more interesting less popular queries - some news-driven, some nostalgic, and some just out of the ordinary:
It has been thirteen years since Jimmy Swaggart helped to bring down rival minister Jim Bakker in a cloud of scandal, and ten years since irony came back to bite Swaggart when he himself was almost brought down after being found with prostitutes. Swaggart is still around, still on TV (mostly cable access), and still conducting worship at his Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He now has his son Donnie sermonizing by his side.
Remember the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver? The movie's subject, math teacher Jaime Escalante, still gets a few searches a week. Escalante moved from Los Angeles to Sacramento in 1991 and retired last year. Each year, over 500 students still participate in the Jaime Escalante summer math program at East Los Angeles College.
You probably already know that the '80s band Echo and the Bunnymen didn't actually include a guy named Echo. What you may not know is that Echo and the Bunnymen reunited in 1997 and have since released two albums, including 1999's What Are You Going To Do With Your Life? For Echo, the answer to this question seems to be "make ignored albums," but the band still has enough fans to get about five searches a day.
If you were listening to Echo back in 1983 and didn't own an Atari system, you probably owned the graphically-superior (but less popular) Intellivision. You just couldn't compare Atari baseball (with two fielders) to Intellivision baseball (with all nine) and I always loved hearing the early voice synthesizer on B-17 Bomber tell me to "watch out? for flak!" We still get searches for Intellivision, and the guys who designed the system have a website where they describe the system's short history in hilarious detail.
Speaking of '80s legacies, Intellivision is to Playstation 2 what Missy Hiatt is to female wrestling superstars like Trish Stratus and Chyna. Hiatt managed the WCW's Steiner Brothers and was named "Most Sexiest Superstar" in 1990 by Pro Wrestling Illustrated (no grammar comments, please). She sued WCW for sexual harassment in 1994 and currently manages in wrestling's third-largest league, ECW.
Wrestling is popular enough to make the WWF a consistent denizen of the Lycos 50's top twenty, so I'm a little surprised that WWF and XFL impresario Vince McMahon gets so few searches. After all, it isn't every sports owner who throws himself into the middle of the action, unless you count the time that Paul Tagliabue rushed for 120 yards and two touchdowns against the Arizona Cardinals.
Poet Helen Steiner Rice was known for her inspirational writings before her death in Cincinnati in 1981. She may be getting searches now because of her holiday-themed poems such as The Story of the Christmas Guest.
Pierre Salinger was once one of the more important figures in politics as President Kennedy's press secretary and later an ABC journalist. Now he's become persona non grata in Washington after giving Oliver Stone a run for his money as the nation's leading connoisseur of conspiracy theories. He is most famous for accusing the U.S. Navy of shooting down TWA Flight 800 over Long Island in 1996.
Montana Governor Marc Racicot has been one of the stars of the Florida Recount, appearing before cameras on behalf of George W. Bush whenever other spokespeople like Karen Hughes and James Baker are off having a sandwich. Racicot is rumored to be a candidate for Attorney General in the Bush cabinet, if there is a Bush cabinet. His name, by the way, is pronounced RAS-co.
And yes, there really is a Saint Chad. He lived in England from 620 to 674 and at one point was elected Archbishop of York in a close race. When certain other figures in the church objected to his election, he withdrew in favor of the other candidate so as not to create a division in the church. How's that for historic irony?
That's all for today's "bottom feeders" of the search world. Tomorrow we'll return to more popular queries - and join us Wednesday as we start counting down the top searches of 2000.
