Y2K was the year's #1 news event, according to searches by Lycos users.
News events proved tricky to track. Many terms overlap: are "world cup" searchers looking for the women's soccer World Cup, the rugby World Cup or a recap of the 1998 men's soccer World Cup? Where necessary, we took educated guesses: for instance, we assigned 10% of all searches on "hurricane" to Hurricane Floyd.
In general, events which affected local individuals (Hurricane Floyd, Y2K) got the most searches. Foreign affairs no matter how disastrous (earthquake in Turkey) took a back seat to domestic North American stories. And celebrity deaths were particularly gripping to web users.
Here's the complete list:
THE TOP 10
1. Y2K
2. Hurricane Floyd
3. Woodstock '99
4. Kosovo
5. Columbine High
6. JFK Jr. crash
7. Women's World Cup
8. Impeachment
9. East Timor
10. Melissa virus
HONORABLE MENTION:
11. Turkey earthquake
12. Egypt Air crash
13. Taiwan earthquake
14. Prince Edward's wedding
15. Payne Stewart plane crash
Hyper-Hype of the Year Award: Y2K.
Bore of the Year Award: Woodstock '99.
Oddly Ignored: Chechnya.
Tomorrow in our grand finale we'll rank all search terms head to head to determine 1999's 50 Most Wanted. Join us then, 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. Individuals (Bruce Springsteen, Britney Spears) are not included in this ranking of bands. All spellings and search variations are included in these totals; for instance, searches for hurricanefloyd and huricane floyd are counted as searches for the Hurricane Floyd. For more details about how we create these lists, please see our Lycos 50 FAQ.
Y2K was the year's #1 news event, according to searches by Lycos users.
