Tis the Season

It's that time of year again- though you wouldn't know it from browsing the internet. Aside from Yahoo dredging out their customary Christmas toolbar with the snow etc. (though they removed the reindeer this year- rather disappointing I must say), the pickings for websites full of Christmas cheer are slim to say the least. The big boys for shopping, CDNow and Amazon, have left off any indication they even know that it's Christmas at all. Ebay has added a few Gif's of presents and a bit of snow in the background. Not even the Vatican itself (www.Vatican.va) is acknowledging Christmas (although they do have a new section called secret archives where they are adding images and the likes of some of their scrolls and manuscripts they've kept hidden for decades- definitely worth a look). Christmas aside though, it's time for the yearly round-ups. Yes, that's right, the years top search terms are in. Surprises all round- Dragonball was most popular for the second year in a row on Lycos and Yahoo (interestingly Dragonball didn't feature on any of Google's lists). It all gets pretty predictable really- Boy bands are down while female singer/songwriters are up, Britney Spears and JLo are still topping most popular women, David Beckham and Anna Kournikova top the athletes, and Ferrari is the most popular brand. Lord of the Rings is topping the movies in Yahoo, but only hits number 15 (overall) on Lycos, and number 10 (for movies) in Google. Of the three Lycos is the best tabulated results, while Google shows some interesting time period trends. However, Google goes to no effort to explain why these are the trends, while Lycos has put a lot of time into making sense of the numbers. Yahoo gives plenty of results for each category but again doesn't attempt to explain trends.

Now in 2003, the 'alternative' best of the 2002 web are emerging. Coming out on top was a web cam site devoted to tracking to recovery of a badly wounded cat who had been hit by a car. 'Frank' is now fully recovered. Another site to do well included animated kittens playing a cover song of Independent Woman by Destiny's Child. More typically, Amazon, Ebay and Google still did well; but surprising everyone was the shock revelation from Yahoo that the new Playstation 2 is more popular than Britney Spears! Could it be that after being at the top since her debut she has begun a downward spiral? Time will tell.