Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Top Searches of 2006

Search engine companies have been publishing their lists of "top searches" of 2006, an interesting way of getting in touch with the pop culture Zeitgeist.

The SearchEngineWatch blog reports the results for Yahoo!, AOL, Lycos and MSN Live.

No, people are not exactly looking for websites about Proust or Kurosawa. As expected, searches turn more towards the trashy (Britney Spears) and the paparazzi-flashers (Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan).

OK, I admit, it's a bummer. Someone in the US spent billions on IT research to make a meganetwork that could survive nuclear war, and all most people want to do is use all that technology to look at pictures of various parts of Paris Hilton's anatomy. But hey, as the saying goes, I don't make the news, I just report it.

Canadian results were different, as Yahoo! Canada reported in a press release titled Canada goes for wingers over singers published earlier in December:

"Canadians love hockey - it's a national obsession. The people, the excitement, the fantasy pools, the Stanley Cup, NHL related searches scored in the top ten search lists winter, spring and fall. In the US, hockey proved to be irrelevant. Britney Spears and mega stars garnered the most interest from Yahoo! users."

"In the summary of overall 2006 search results that Yahoo! Canada released today, patterns in Canada were different than in the U.S. Where conservative Canadians looked online for tax information, sports, weather updates, reality shows and techie trends, in the U.S. overall search was focused on celebrity gossip and entertainment."
The French version of Yahoo! Canada also reported its results.

Among the top 10 searches are such sexy topics as Sudoku, the Quebec government employment agency, the government automobile insurance agency, the post office, the tax agency, and Environment Canada (for weather reports).

Oh, and hockey.

2 celebrities did make into the francophone top 10: Céline Dion (unavoidable, you can't have a survey without "notre vedette nationale" figuring among the winners) and actress Lucie Laurier, star of the hit Canadian film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, who suffered a "wardrobe malfunction" or mini-Nipplegate during an interview on a Montreal music video station. For those who haven't seen the movie, it is the story of a stern Ontario Anglo detective who has to team up with a more unorthodox, wild Québécois cop to investigate the homicide of a hockey executive, whose corpse is found straddling the Quebec-Ontario border.

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posted by Michel-Adrien at 6:54 pm

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