from lucianne http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=humannews&StoryID=233374

By Andrea Orr

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden has displaced Pamela Anderson in cyberspace and people looking for information about the American flag outnumbered those curious about Britney Spears.

For the first time in the short history of the Internet, popular search engines report that "sex" dropped off their lists of top 10 search terms in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"Popular search terms last week turned almost exclusively to disaster-related information," said David Emanuel, spokesman for the popular search engine AltaVista, which tracks top search terms. Almost all perennial favorites like Pamela Anderson Lee, Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys were knocked off the list.

Sex, a longtime favorite usually in the top 10, dropped to No. 17, Emanuel said.

Instead of entertainment and assorted fluff that has for years attracted the bulk of all Internet traffic, it was news, news and more news that people were looking for on AltaVista. CNN, News, World Trade Center, BBC and Pentagon were the top searches on the site last week.

The search engine Google, which tracks shifting preferences by measuring the top gaining and declining queries each week, saw the same basic pattern.

Topics related to sports, television and computers dropped in popularity on Google. Its top gainers were CNN, World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden, Taliban, American Flag, FBI, Pentagon, American Airlines and American Red Cross.

But it was not all news all the time on Google. The company said that no term enjoyed such a surge in popularity as Nostradamus.

The 16th-century French astrologer, whose cryptic predictions may or may not have forecast everything that has ever happened, came into the spotlight following some widely circulated e-mails suggesting he had foretold such an attack in a prophecy that has been translated to read "in the year of the new century and nine months...."

Ask Jeeves, another Internet search service that lets visitors enter plain-English questions such as "Where is the World Trade Center?" said the majority of questions it received last week were in fact about the World Trade Center. Still, questions about Nostradamus did outnumber those about Osama bin Laden on its Web site.

At Yahoo News, producers had grown used to the funny, the quirky and the sexy stories getting more hits than the serious ones.

Until last week.

"You can see the nation's clearly obsessed with this tragedy," said Kourosh Karimkhany, senior producer for Yahoo News.

He said Yahoo's traffic had surged to at least 10 times normal levels since last week, and the overwhelming number of visitors were seeking information about the attacks.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

Answers

Thanks for posting this, Beckie. I tried to get at it but was terribly hung up. Maybe someone will learn something from this.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001