URL: http://50.lycos.com/2003review.asp

   

<h>Web's Most Wanted Awards 2003

<l> Top 100 of 2003
       KaZaA
<l>     Top Men
       Kobe Bryant
<l>     Top Women
       Britney Spears
<l>     Top Music Groups
       t.A.T.u.
<l>      Top TV
       American Idol
<l>      Top Movies
       The Matrix Sequels
<l>      Top Sports
       Kobe Bryant
<l>      Top News
       Iraq War
<l>     Top Fads
       Paris Hilton Tape
<l>      Current Lycos 50
       What's hot now.
<l>     Top 100 of 2002
       Revisit the past.
<l>      Top 100 of 2001
       Revisit the even further past.
<l>      Third Anniversary
       The strangest topics in Lycos 50 history.

<h>Lycos 50 Archives

<l>      This Week's Top 50: They Shoot Pheasants, Don't They?
       December 18, 2006
<l>      Top TV Shows and Bands of 2006
       December 15, 2006
<l>      Top Women of 2006
       December 14, 2006
<l>      Top Men of 2006
       December 13, 2006
<l>      Top Search Terms for 2006
       December 12, 2006
<l>      Britney leads the pack.
       December 11, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Christmastime is here.
       December 6, 2006
<l>     This Week's Top 50: Hard-partying starlets
       December 5, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: OJ's TV special canceled.
       November 26, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Celeb Trouble
       November 25, 2006
<l>      Top Toys and Games for 2006
       November 21, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Spyware triumphs; celebrity divorces
       November 11, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Gay Marriage
       November 7, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Top city searches
       November 4, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Political moves
       October 31, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Whither Canadian TV Guide?
       October 30, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Messy divorces
       October 24, 2006
<l>     This Week's Top 50: Happy (almost) Halloween!
       October 21, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Movies, Music, and Heather Mills
       October 17, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Web users vs. Nielsen ratings
       October 14, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Searches for Mark Foley increase dramatically
       October 12, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Return of the Mouse
       October 11, 2006
<l>      Top Talk Radio Personalities of 2006
       October 10, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Former teen stars
       October 3, 2006
<l>     This Week's Top 50: Harry Potter puts a spell on Lycos users.
       September 30, 2006
<l>      The Power of the Claymates
       September 28, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Tyra, TV, and Fashion
       September 26, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Trouble for Tiger and the Domination of
       MySpace
       September 23, 2006
<l>      This Week's Top 50: Pam, Paris, and Poker
       September 16, 2006
<l>      Fever: The New Lycos 50
       July 11, 2006
<l>      The Sporting Life
       July 8-10, 2006
<l>      Breathe... Breathe in the Air
       July 7, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: The Fourth, Footie, and the Caped Crusader
       July 6, 2006
<l>      Happy Fourth of July! The New Lycos 50
       July 4, 2006
<l>      Who's Got Next?
       July 1, 2006
<l>      Take the E-Train
       June 29, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Rainbow Quartz, Matsyasana and Used Cars
       June 28, 2006
<l>      Busy Blondes & Blockbusters: The New Lycos 50
       June 27, 2006
<l>      X-Ray Vision, Priorities and a "Promiscuous" Vixen
       June 23, 2006
<l>      Straight to the Top
       June 22, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Taxes, Tamara and Another Brazilian Export
       June 21, 2006
<l>      A Full House: The New Lycos 50
       June 20, 2006
<l>      Send Me a Postcard, Drop Me a Line
       June 17-19, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Stars, Star Maps & Lost Stars
       June 16, 2006
<l>      Love & Death: The New Lycos 50
       June 13, 2006
<l>      World Cup Mania
       June 10-12, 2006
<l>      Angelina, Brad, Jennifer and Vince
       June 9, 2006
<l>      What Would Bob Do?
       June 8, 2006
<l>      Movers & Shakers: Mint Juleps, Ill-behaved Instructors, and Dance
       Queens
       June 7, 2006
<l>      Angelic Babies and Phishy Births
       June 3, 2006
<l>      Soul Patrol, Rio & The Purple One
       June 2, 2006
<l>      Meithaema Arrives
       June 1, 2006
     

<h>Around the Lycos 50

<l>      Today's Column
       Cool Cheat Sheet
<l>      Lycos 50 Blog
       Viral Content
<l>      Lycos 50 Archives
       Revisit the past
<l>      Lycos 50 Elite
       Our most popular subjects ever
<l>      Lycos 50 FAQ
       How we uncover trends...
<l>      Biography
       Meet the wacky crew that brings you the Lycos 50.

<p>                                   with Aaron Schatz 
   
<h>   The Lycos 50 Daily Report 
                                            
<h>   The things you're searching for.

<h>KaZaA: Web's Most Wanted 2003

<h>   December 10, 2003

<p>   Napster paved the way, but the most popular file-swapping software of
   all time is KaZaA, which this year overthrows Dragonball to stand as
   the number one search term of 2003 with Web users.

<p>   Since Napster was introduced in 2000, there have been a succession of
   file-swapping software programs. At all times, there was always one
   program that dominated the others in searches. First it was Napster,
   which ended as the #3 term of 2001. When the government took Napster
   down, that led to the rise of Morpheus, the #5 term of 2002. Then
   Morpheus had troubles and was replaced as the dominant software by the
   capitalization-challenged KaZaA and its spyware-free cousin, KaZaA
   Lite.

<p>   KaZaA shot up the Lycos 50 in mid-2002 and ended last year as the #64
   term of 2002. This year, it spent 15 weeks as the number one search
   term on our weekly list and only dropped out of the top five for two
   weeks during the Iraq War when The Lycos 50 was dominated by
   war-related search terms. During 2003, KaZaA received twice as many
   searches as all other file-swapping softwares put together. Only one
   other file swapper, WinMX (#86), makes the top 100. Napster falls from
   #49 to #165, while Audiogalaxy, which was #74 for 2002, falls out of
   the top 500 terms.

<p>   Dragonball falls from two straight years at #1 to the #3 spot, and in
   between comes the resurgent Britney Spears at #2. Actually, Britney
   had fallen out of the weekly top ten by the middle of 2003, but in
   August she climbed back to the top following a succession of publicity
   stunts generating oodles of queries from curious Lycos users. Between
   her topless photos on the covers of Elle Magazine (U.K. edition) and
   Rolling Stone, her bottomless photo on the cover of Esquire and most
   significantly, her kiss with Madonna (#84) during the MTV Video Music
   Awards, Web users were searching for Britney one more time.

<p>   2003 was also a very significant year for huge stories that dominated
   Internet traffic for weeks at a time. The two biggest stories we have
   tracked since we began the Lycos 50 in 1999 were the September 11
   terrorist attacks and the 2000 election and recount, but the next
   three biggest events -- if you count searches over a two- to
   three-week period -- all occurred in 2003. They were the War in Iraq
   (#15), the rape allegation against NBA star Kobe Bryant (#6), and the
   Paris Hilton sex tape. (#4)

<p>   March and April saw Lycos inundated for searches related to the war.
   This was a more conventionally fought war than the one in Afghanistan
   last year, and for the first time in history people could follow the
   news of the war in real time through the Internet. In particular,
   people at offices without access to television used the Internet to
   keep up to date on the latest news. The Internet also significantly
   changed the way people followed the Iraq War because of the
   availability of foreign news sources offering differing opinions of
   the actions taken by the United States. Lycos users searched for
   newspapers from around the world, such as Le Monde, Arab News, and The
   Jerusalem Post.

<p>   By far the most-searched news source from outside the United States
   was the Arabic Al-Jazeera cable news network. Whenever information is
   not available through conventional news sources, we've found that
   Internet searches multiply, and this is what happened when the video
   of American prisoners of war captured in Iraq became available through
   the Al-Jazeera website. For a brief period in 2003, Al-Jazeera
   searches were three times more popular than searches for sex.

<p>   The desire to find information not given by conventional news sources
   also drove many of the searches in July and August that made Kobe
   Bryant the highest-searched male of 2003. During these months, over
   half of the searches for the Kobe Bryant rape case searched not for
   Bryant himself but for information about the name and biography of his
   accuser. These searches demonstrated a major dilemma for high-profile
   sexual assault cases in the Internet era. With so much information
   available online, and so little policing of what sites are publishing,
   no high-profile rape victim can count on remaining anonymous. Major
   news organizations kept the woman's name and picture private but
   independent websites and radio talk show hosts revealed this woman's
   name and stories about her past that may or may not be true. The
   accuser actually finished the year as the sixth most-searched woman of
   2003, with more searches than Anna Kournikova (#37), Christina
   Aguilera (#25), or Madonna, but only one of six searches asked for her
   by name.

<p>   The end of 2003 has been dominated by celebrity scandals like the
   Prince Charles rumors (#156), the Michael Jackson (#73) arrest, and,
   most significantly, the Paris Hilton sex tape. Interest in the
   debutante party girl had been growing gradually all year, and she
   finally appeared in the Lycos 50 for the first time in October. But
   once the homemade video of her having sex with ex-boyfriend Rick
   Solomon was released on the Internet in November, searches for Hilton
   exploded. It's just the latest example of how search activity goes
   sky-high whenever someone we don't expect to see naked appears naked,
   or is rumored to be naked, on the Internet. During the second week of
   November, Paris Hilton and the sex tape generated more search activity
   than all of the search terms from number two through number 15
   combined.

<p>   On the entertainment front, the significant development of 2003 was a
   higher-than-usual number of stars who seemingly came out of nowhere to
   take prominent places in pop culture. Actually, in the case of Clay
   Aiken (#24), one star literally came out of nowhere. In January, Aiken
   was a 24-year-old just out of college and working with the mentally
   disabled in North Carolina. By midsummer, he was one of America's
   biggest musical superstars thanks to American Idol (#30), and for the
   year he finishes as the third most-searched male on the Internet
   behind only Kobe Bryant and rapper 50 Cent (#18) -- another star who
   never received searches until late 2002.

<p>   What's most astonishing about Aiken's popularity is that his fan base,
   perceived as consisting of teenage girls, actually consists primarily
   of women aged 30 to 50. Those teenage girls instead turned their
   attention in 2003 to two new musical stars, Canadian rocker Avril
   Lavigne (#51) and sitcom-actress-turned-singer-and-movie-star Hilary
   Duff (#61). Out-of-nowhere entertainment stars also included the
   Russian pop group t.A.T.u. (#39) and the goth-rock band Evanescence
   (#71).

<p>   OTHER BIG BREAKOUTS OF 2003: Pop psychologist Dr. Phil, Atkins
   competitor The South Beach Diet, Japanese cartoon Inuyasha, maturing
   teen queens The Olsen Twins, wrestling babe Torrie Wilson, Jamaican
   dancehall rapper Sean Paul, porn star-turned-politician Mary Carey,
   rockers Coldplay, jazz-pop chanteuse Norah Jones, and celebrity dirt
   website The Smoking Gun.

<p>   HOT IN 2002, NOT HOT IN 2003: all file-swapping software except KaZaA,
   the sex tape scandal of Asian politician Chu Mei-Feng, pop star
   Shakira, actor Josh Hartnett, Summer Olympics, toy and cartoon Zoids,
   rock bands Incubus, Blink-182, and System of a Down, Super Bowl
   commercials, and searches related to the September 11 attacks on
   America.

<p>   WHERE ARE THEY NOW: If you are looking for tattoos, the term which
   ranked #3 in 2002 and #4 in 2001, we made an editorial decision in
   June to retire the term from the Lycos 50 after 200 weeks. The
   searches had become so constant that tattoos belonged on the list of
   generic subjects like lyrics and games that we don't include on our
   weekly list.

<p>   ONES TO WATCH 2004: There hasn't been a movie in years as
   controversial as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which is
   already getting lots of searches... Other hot 2004 films getting
   searches already include Brad Pitt in Troy, Harry Potter and the
   Prisoner of Azkaban, and Catwoman, which also should make Halle Berry
   a summer staple of the Lycos 50... Rock band Nine Inch Nails gets
   plenty of searches but has never made the Lycos 50; that should change
   when 2004 brings their first album of new material since 1999... Chad
   Michael Murray looks like the next hot teen heartthrob... The latest
   game in the Grand Theft Auto series is scheduled for fall 2004...
   Since female artists usually get even bigger once they go solo
   (example: Beyonce), expect big things from No Doubt's Gwen Stefani in
   2004... A couple of previously unknown athletes become huge stars
   during each Olympics, and two U.S. names to watch are gymnasts
   Chellsie Memmel and Carly Patterson... Anti-impotence drug Cialis is
   hugely popular in Europe and is coming to challenge Viagra in the U.S.

<p>   ONES TO WATCH 2003: Our predictions for 2003 turned out to be quite
   successful. Daredevil boosted Jennifer Garner to stardom, even though
   the movie didn't do as well as expected. The Matrix Reloaded and
   Terminator 3 both made plenty of money. LeBron James went from high
   school prospect to the NBA player with the most-purchased jersey.
   Beyonce became a true R&B superstar with her first solo album. On the
   other hand, computer game Doom III was delayed and never came out, and
   actor Eric Bana went nowhere as star of The Hulk.

<p>   KEEP WATCHING: That's not all for the Web's Most Wanted awards. Check
   the box on the top right for our other lists including top TV and
   movies, top men and women, and top fads, updated through December 18.
   Plus, the Lycos 50 will still be updated each week through December.

<h>Web's Most Wanted 2003

<p>   The Top 100 items of the year 2003, with last year's rank in
   parentheses.

