Searching questions for the net

It seems amazing that only a couple of years ago, if you asked most people what a search engine was, they probably would have thought it was some kind of train spotter. Yet such are the inroads the internet has made into everyday life that today, almost everyone has their favourite, their second choice - and the ones they can never be bothered with - and will gladly tell anyone in the pub why.

But although we all use them several times a day, our communion with a search engine remains an oddly personal thing. Tapping in a search term is something you prefer to do in private. It exposes the curious - usually idly curious, sometimes stupidly curious - part of our brain.

Few of us, then, would be thrilled by friends and colleagues seeing a full list of everything we've searched for in the past month. Yet the data search-engine companies can collate at the touch of a button about what people search for is some of the rawest and most interesting sociological - and marketing - material it's possible to get. It's undiluted information, after all, about people's personal and private interests and obsessions; it is not too pretentious to say that it's almost like hearing people's prayers.

So what have people's interests and obsessions been in 2001?

Lycos, the US-based search engine, can give some idea thanks to its intriguing compilations of top search terms, which are hidden away at the website http://50.lycos.com. The company, by the way, filters out the more explicit pornographic searches from its figures, so its data is not too tainted by the shadow of the dirty raincoat.

And its just-released 2001 top 100 has a surprise at the very top. Lycos's most enquired-after term this year has not been, as you might imagine, "Pamela Anderson", "Harry Potter" or "Osama bin Laden", but "Dragonball", a Japanese TV cartoon/game/ merchandising opportunity that is barely known to anyone not in the critical male seven to 15-year-old bracket.

Only from number two downwards does the list start to match what you might expect it to.

Second most wanted-on-the-web is "Britney Spears" and third "Napster", the legally troubled free music site whose fate has been of abiding concern to the idle and stingy young.

"Tattoos" comes in at number four, which is both depressing and encouraging - the former for obvious reasons, the latter because it is amazing that anybody so interested in the things knows how their notoriously tricky spelling goes.

At number five, congratulations to "Osama bin Laden", who was unplaced by Lycos last year. At number six, "IRS" - America's Internal Revenue Service. Further down come Pokémon, the World Trade Center, Nostradamus, WWF (the wrestling thing, not Prince Philip's panda-rescue lot), and Pamela Adnerson.

"Harry Potter" is only at 14, ahead of "Christmas" at 17, "The Bible" at 18, "Golf" at 19 and "Halloween" at 20. For a more British-biased selection of fixations, I asked Lycos today to collate UK-only searches; the results, which are for this month only, give a fascinating picture of both our differences from the States and our uniquely, some will say, small-minded approach to life.

What has been the single most used search term on Lycos recently? "Afghanistan", perhaps? "The euro"? "God"? "The meaning of life"?

Nope. It's "Free". As in no cost. As in, who cares what it is, so long as it's a freebie?

And the second biggest? Er, "sex". Then "UK", then "pictures", "pix", "London", "Christmas", "music", "car" and, at number 10, "sexy".

A not altogether inspiring picture, then, of a bunch of stingy sex-obsessives.

For an even more intriguing commentary - and this a live one - of Britain's tastes and interests, there's nowhere better to look than the Jeeves engine's running commentary of what people are searching for live (www.ask.co.uk). Because you're seeing the search terms virtually as people tap them in, this is still more like peeking through people's keyholes. Because of Jeeves's unique search style, you also have the benefit of peeking at the actual obsessions, spelled out in full, rather than the monosyllabic grunts favoured by other search engines.

And what were Jeeves searchers looking for in a snapshot yesterday evening? Everything from the puzzling to the bleeding obvious, it turns out.

"How can I find old school and college friends with Friends Reunited?" (How about looking on Friends Reunited?)

"Where can I find encyclopaedic resources on silk?" (Er, an encyclopaedia?)

"Where can I find the website for Corona Extra beer?" (I know, you want some free.)

"How much does a new car from the manufacturer BMW cost?" (How long is a piece of string?)

And most pathetically - "How can I find someone?" How, indeed.