You can't cross the street these days without tripping over somebody's all-century list. But how do these lists match up with web user interest? Let's compare a few year-end awards with our 1999 Lycos user queries.
PEOPLE: Time magazine named Jeff Bezos as person of the year and Albert Einstein as person of the century. Do web users agree? Not exactly.
Bezos wasn't even one of 1999's top 50,000 search terms. (Among those who got more searches than Bezos: Bing Crosby, Baudelaire and the Pillsbury Doughboy.) However, Bezos's company Amazon.com was the most-requested e-tailer of the year, so perhaps Time and the Web are in tune after all.
As for Einstein, he was #6 on the Lycos list of 1999's most-requested historical figures. The only 20th century figure to beat him was Adolf Hitler -- nobody's favorite dude of the century. So again the Web and Time seem to agree.
COLLEGES: U.S. News & World Report released its annual list of the nation's top universities, putting the California Institute of Technology at #1. Here's how they stack up against the Web's most popular schools:
US News Top 5
1. Cal Tech
2. Harvard
3. MIT
4. Princeton
4. Yale (tie) |
|
Web's Top 5
1. Harvard
2. Penn State
3. Univ. of Texas
4. Univ. of Washington
5. Univ. of Michigan |
Clearly size matters online: the bigger the college, the greater the queries. (Harvard is the notable exception.) And how did Cal Tech fare on the Web? Didn't even make the top 50. The Culinary Institute of America got more searches.
MOVIES: The American Film Insitute's list of the century's 100 Greatest Movies leads off with Citizen Kane. Web users lead off with... Dorothy and Toto:
AFI's Top 5
1. Citizen Kane
2. Casablanca
3. The Godfather
4. Gone With the Wind
5. Lawrence of Arabia |
|
Web's Top 5
1. The Wizard of Oz
2. Gone With the Wind
3. Rocky Horror Picture Show
4. A Clockwork Orange
5. The Godfather |
Don't ask us to explain the popularity boom for A Clockwork Orange, a creepy movie if ever there was one. It may have gotten a boost from the 1999 death of director Stanely Kubrick. (Note: Star Wars and Titanic would be 1-2 if we hadn't left them off because they've both been in the news so much lately.)
POETRY: Since poetry has been so hot on the Lycos 50, we checked NPR's list of the 15 greatest poems of the century. None of the named poems showed up on our search logs, so we've defaulted to the poets instead:
NPR's Top 5
1. T.S. Eliot
2. Hart Crane
3. Allen Ginsberg
4. Langston Hughes
5. Robert Frost |
|
Web's Top 5
1. Robert Frost
2. Maya Angelou
3. Langston Hughes
4. Pablo Neruda
5. Sylvia Plath |
Now, that's interesting. Plath gets an assist from her infamous suicide, no doubt. But you've got to give her double word score for cracking the top 5.
So much for 1999. On Tuesday we'll be back with the new hottest terms in the week's Lycos 50. Join us then, won't you?
