In a year that began in New Hampshire, with an election, and ended in Florida, with (ugh) an election, Lycos users have elected a dynamic young singer over a Japanese cartoon phenomenon as Web's Most Wanted 2000.
Britney Spears narrowly tops Dragonball to stand as the most popular web search of 2000. Both items were more than twice as popular as the next item, previous champion Pokemon.
THE TOP 50 (last year's rank in parentheses):
1. Britney Spears (2)
2. Dragonball (4)
3. Pokemon (1)
4. WWF (3)
5. 'N Sync (14)
6. Pamela Anderson (5)
7. Tattoos (11)
8. Napster (-)
9. Jennifer Lopez (18)
10. Summer Olympics (-)
11. NFL (25)
12. Election 2000 (-)
13. Las Vegas (19)
14. Backstreet Boys (7)
15. Eminem (-)
16. Christmas (29)
17. Final Fantasy (24)
18. Anna Kournikova (37)
19. Halloween (9)
20. clubs (32)
21. Big Brother (-)
22. Baseball (26)
23. The IRS (42)
24. Christina Aguilera (-)
25. The Bible (33)
26. Gundam Wing (-)
27. Sailor Moon (31)
28. Nascar (28)
29. The Simpsons (28)
30. Korn (34)
31. The X-Men (-)
32. Shania Twain (35)
33. South Park (12)
34. Metallica (-)
35. Digimon (-)
36. Skateboarding (-)
37. Madonna (-)
38. Harry Potter (-)
39. NBA (-)
40. Golf (16)
41. Diablo II (-)
42. Carmen Electra (47)
43. Mariah Carey (46)
44. Valentine's Day (-)
45. Blink-182 (-)
46. Survivor (-)
47. Tupac Shakur (-)
48. Limp Bizkit (40)
49. DMX (-)
50. Star Wars (6)
DIG DEEPER with searches 51-100.
BOYS VS. GIRLS: Nine women make the Top 50, but only three men, not counting the boys of the boy bands.
UNSPORTSMANLIKE: Once again, sports figures don't hold up next to other celebrities in the Lycos search world. The next-highest active athlete after Anna Kournikova is slam dunk artist Vince Carter, all the way down at #226. Speaking of which?
STRANGELY ABSENT: He's won Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year twice now. He dominates a sport that finishes at #40 overall. He's a ubiquitous star of TV advertising. And yet Tiger Woods not only misses the Top 50, he can't even make the top 200.
ROOKIE OF THE YEAR: Napster. Barely heard of by a few computer geeks in 1999, it took the front-covers of newsmagazines by storm and created a music industry crisis. Searches went up more than 5400 percent compared to 1999.
COMEBACK OF THE YEAR: Madonna, who has come back more times than Sugar Ray Leonard and George Foreman combined.
TREND OF THE YEAR: Thanks to Big Brother and Survivor, people over the age of 25 discovered the world of reality programming. Will this trend continue in 2001? CBS hopes so; Survivor II will premiere after the Super Bowl and then take on NBC's Thursday night juggernaut Friends.
Meanwhile, we're already seeing searches for FOX's upcoming sleeze-fest Temptation Island, but hardly any for ABC's The Mole.
HOT IN 1999, NOT SO HOT IN 2000: Beanie Babies, Blair Witch Project, Jennifer Love Hewitt, WCW, and Rena Mero, aka Sable.
ONES TO WATCH 2001: Bands Tool and Destiny's Child, movies Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings, actress Angelina Jolie, and the XFL, a spring football league from the folks who bring you the WWF.
ONES TO WATCH 2000: We were on the money with our expectations for Creed, but most of our other predictions didn't pan out, including Spanish TV network Univision and dead artist M.C. Escher.
Thanks for joining us for this year's Web's Most Wanted awards. We'll be back Wednesday, December 27 with a new edition of the Lycos 50. Whatever your holiday of choice, have a good one.
Note: These rankings reflect all terms entered into the Lycos search engine by users between January 1 and November 30, 2000, except for Election 2000 and Christmas, which are estimated with the inclusion of December searches. All spellings and search variations are included in these totals: for instance, searches for Backstreet Boyz 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.
