OPINION
Use the Web to See 2003
06-01-2003
by Bernie Goldbach
Taking a look at the aggregated results of the top on-line search engines gives important clues to the hottest consumer trends for the year ahead.
If you want to escape boy bands, you can take comfort in the fact that they are falling off dramatically in popularity among people who search the worldwide Web. This finding, and several other surprising results, appears after reading "Lycos Most Wanted," Google's "Zeitgeist" and "Yahoo Buzz." All three of these regularly updated reports give interesting and predictive information about current consumer trends.
"Lycos Most Wanted" lists the top 100 search terms for 2002 and many are the same as in Google's Zeitgeist and Yahoo Buzz. However, one thing is missing from all three. You won't find the hottest search engine queries for adult material among the results, unless you pay each of the search engines for that information.
"For the first time since we started the Lycos 50, 2002 saw big changes in pop music style," said Aaron Schatz, research associate at Lycos. "Boy bands fell off a cliff: 'N Sync, the top music group of the past two years, fell from number 36 to number 163 this year, while Backstreet Boys fell even further, from number 58 to number 250."
This conclusion will unsettle the Irish boy band industry. At the same time, female singer/songwriters rose in the search engine charts. You could predict the rise of Avril Levigne to stardom because people started searching for her name early last summer.
New female performers replaced declining music acts in Lycos. International star Shakira (up from number 293 to number 31) has the looks, but she also co-wrote all the songs on her first English-language release. Canadian teenager Avril Lavigne (number 86), who many Webloggers declared "one to watch" as early as May, defied the midriff-baring rules of pop fashion and led a movement of young female singer-songwriters. Both Google and Yahoo mirror these findings and they included Pink and Kylie in their Top 100 listings for 2002 as well.
Top 10 search engine queries include many of the same names across all three major search engines. For 2002, the most frequently requested information was about Dragonball, KaZaA, Tattoos, Britney Spears, Morpheus, NFL, IRS, Halloween, Christmas and Pamela Anderson.
The Top 10 results reflect the international nature of the Internet. Japanese viewers crave Dragonball, a 2002 Japanese animation sensation. Most Irish have never heard of it. Both the NFL and the IRS are American terms, relating to football and Revenue respectively. In a unique twist, Lycos has identified thousands of queries related to NFL sponsorship advertisements. People are searching for terms they see during televised American football games.
Domestic terrorism lingers in the minds of many people making queries of search engines. Requests for information about the World Trade Center declined 40 percent but the term remains within the top 30. The biggest drop belonged to supposed attack predictor and legendary prophet Nostradamus, who fell from among the top 10 in 2001 to no better than number 309 in 2002.
What do the search engines think will be hot in 2003? The movies Matrix Reloaded and Terminator 3 plus stars Jennifer Garner (Elektra in Daredevil) and Eric Bana (Bruce Banner in Hulk) will do well. R&B singer Beyonce Knowles will go multi-platinum. Sales of computer games Sims Online and Doom III will be brisk. And Beblade is predicted to be the hottest kids' toy.
You can judge the accuracy of these predictions for yourself by watching the trends at http://50.lycos.com, http://buzz.yahoo.com, or looking up Google Zeitgeist.
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