The year began with impeachment (remember?) and ends with Millennium Princess Barbie. Inbetween we had Blair Witch, Woodstock, Y2K scares, Hurricane Floyd... and of course, Jar Jar Binks.
We've tallied user searches throughout the year to find out which terms Lycos users asked for most. Without further ado, we present to you the result: the 50 most popular search terms of 1999.
THE TOP 25
1. Pokemon
2. Britney Spears
3. WWF
4. Dragonball Z
5. Pamela Anderson
6. Star Wars
7. Backstreet Boys
8. Poetry
9. Halloween
10. Blair Witch Project
11. Tattoos
12. South Park
13. Beanie Babies
14. 'N Sync
15. Playstation
16. Golf
17. Football
18. Jennifer Lopez
19. Las Vegas
20. Y2K
21. Wrestling
22. Pregnancy
23. Sable
24. Final Fantasy
25. NFL
THE SECOND 25:
26. Baseball
27. Guns
28. Nascar
29. Christmas
30. Hurricane Floyd
31. Sailor Moon
32. Marijuana
33. The Bible
34. Korn
35. Shania Twain
36. DVD
37. Anna Kournikova
38. The Simpsons
39. Jennifer Love Hewitt
40. Limp Bizkit
41. Ricky Martin
42. The IRS
43. Jenny McCarthy
44. Nintendo
45. WCW
46. Mariah Carey
47. Carmen Electra
48. Woodstock '99
49. Austin Powers
50. NASA
Rookie of the Year Award: Britney Spears. You've got to give it up for her: a year ago she was practically unknown.
Bore of the Year Award: Pro wrestling.
Hot in '98, Not So Hot in '99: Titanic, Nine Inch Nails, UFOs, Anna Nicole Smith, Gillian Anderson, Furby, Taco Bell dog.
Ones to Watch for 2000: Univision (cable network), Creed and Sugar Ray (bands), euthanasia (issue), paintball (game), M.C. Escher (dead artist).
You want trends? Here's what looked hot in 1999:
Scary Stuff: The Blair Witch Project rocked the box office. Halloween started getting hot in August. Witches (and Wiccans) were popular all year. And of the top five most-requested historical figures, three were Adolf Hitler, spooky seer Nostradamus, and agony author Edgar Allan Poe.
Sports Hot, Athletes Not: Golf, football, the NFL and Nascar all made the year's top 50. (Toss in wrestling, the WWF and the WCW if you like.) Yet the only athlete to make the top 50 was teen pinup Anna Kournikova. Where's Tiger Woods? Where's Mark McGwire? Where's Venus Williams? They just aren't getting the queries.
No Movie Stars: Similar story: six current or former TV personalities made the year's top 50 (eight if you count Sable and The Simpsons). Number of movie stars: zero.
The Mystery of Dragonball Z: How can Japanese TV show Dragonball Z be so popular online and so unheard of offline? If search terms are any indication, DBZ ought to be far more popular. (Perhaps in 2000?)
This ends our two-week series on the most popular terms of 1999. Thank you for joining us. Please come back again on Monday, when we'll return to our regular Lycos 50 daily report.
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 BackstreetBoyz and Backstreet Boys pics are counted as searches for the Backstreet Boys. For more details about how we create these lists, please see our Lycos 50 FAQ.
The year began with impeachment (remember?) and ends with Millennium Princess Barbie. Inbetween we had Blair Witch, Woodstock, Y2K scares, Hurricane Floyd... and of course, Jar Jar Binks.
