William Shakespeare is the most popular person of the last 1000 years, according to a tally of Lycos user searches.
Today we reveal the Millennium's Most Wanted -- our list of historical figures who received the most web searches this year. In order to qualify, a person must have been been alive after the year 1000 A.D. and (to weed out modern-day celebrity bias) must have died before 1960.
Shakespeare is an obvious choice, but the rest of the top five is quite startling. The complete list:
1. William Shakespeare
2. Nostradamus
3. Adolf Hitler
4. Edgar Allan Poe
5. Joan of Arc
6. Albert Einstein
7. Leonardo da Vinci
8. George Washington
9. Abraham Lincoln
10. Christopher Columbus
HONORABLE MENTION:
11. Benjamin Franklin
12. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
13. Vincent Van Gogh
14. Mark Twain
15. Thomas Jefferson
16. Michelangelo
17. Ludwig van Beethoven
18. Galileo Galilei
19. Sir Isaac Newton
20. Napoleon Bonaparte
Surprise of the Year Award: Joan of Arc. (It doesn't hurt to have Milla Jovovich play you in a major motion picture.)
Bore of the Year Award: Nostradamus. The 16th-century prophet and mumbo-jumbo specialist has been very big with the Y2K crowd.
Too Young to Qualify: Two 20th-century artists would have been in the top 10 had they not lived past the cutoff date. Salvador Dali (d. 1989) would have ranked a surprising #10, and Pablo Picasso (d. 1973) an even more surprising #6.
Other Women: The next women on the list would be Emily Dickinson at #21, Harriet Tubman at #24 and Eleanor Roosevelt (d. 1962) at #25.
Pop Culture Equivalent: Guitarist Jimi Hendrix (d. 1972) would have ranked #11, between Columbus and Ben Franklin.
Yo! Poe? What to make of the popularity of Edgar Allan Poe? We don't know. We can only guess that his creepy outlook appeals to a particularly devoted element of the web audience. He's a favorite with high school literature classes. And he may get a boost from being closely related with Halloween.
On Monday we'll reveal 1999s Most Wanted Men. Join us, won't you?
Note: These rankings reflect all terms entered into the Lycos search engine by users between January 1 and Thanksgiving (November 25) 1999. All spellings and search variations are included in these totals; for instance, searches for Shakspeare and Shakespeare bio are counted as searches for William Shakespeare For more details about how we create these lists, please see our Lycos 50 FAQ.
William Shakespeare is the most popular person of the last 1000 years, according to a tally of Lycos user searches.
