While the aftermath of last year's terrorist attacks received searches all year long, the Winter Olympics are the most popular news story of 2002, according to searches by Lycos users.

The Olympics spent 11 weeks in the Lycos 50 this year, peaking at #1, and the searches for those three months were high enough to outrank the year-long memorializing of last year's terrorist attacks. While most September 11-related terms fell sharply in 2002, the term September 11 itself ranks #33 on our overall list of the year's top topics.

Here are the Top 20 news stories of 2002:

1. Winter Olympics
2. September 11 anniversary
3. Chu Mei-Feng sex scandal
4. War on Terror
5. Super Bowl XXXVI
6. Enron scandal
7. West Nile Virus
8. R. Kelly sex scandal
9. World Cup 2002
10. Singer Lisa Lopes dies

11. Washington snipers
12. War in Afghanistan
13. Stem cell research
14. Daniel Pearl kidnapping and video
15. War in Iraq
16. NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon divorces
17. Aftermath of anthrax scares
18. Porn star Linda Lovelace dies
19. Shock jocks Opie and Anthony fired
20. 2002 midterm elections

HUH?: The strangely popular Asian sex scandal involving Taiwanese politician Chu Mei-Feng is explained here.

SMALLER ELECTION: Midterm elections garner less attention than presidential ones, and that's even more true online. The election aftermath did show up for one week at #5, but Lycos users didn't spend much time looking for information on the candidates beforehand. Races that did get some attention were for governor in Florida and Massachusetts, and for Senator in Minnesota and North Carolina.

DEAD POOL 2002: An unfortunate number of famous musicians died in 2002. Along with TLC's Lopes, other dead musicians that appeared on the Lycos 50 this year included Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley, rap pioneer Jam Master Jay, and Who bassist John Entwistle.

ALSO BIG IN 2002: The trial of Andrea Yates, actress Tawny Kitaen assaults husband and major league pitcher Chuck Finley, caught-on-tape child abuser Madelyne Gorman Toogood, Maryland's infestation of snakehead fish.

VIRUSES ON PARADE: Last year we had a ton of big computer viruses, but the biggest virus of 2002, Bugbear, never made the Lycos 50. The year's big computer story was the e-mail hoax that told people to delete the file JDBGMGR.EXE.