Below are the most active keywords searched for on go2net’s MetaCrawler, the web’s most-used metasearch tool. MetaCrawler searches AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and Yahoo simultaneously. The terms are provided by go2net. For further information, and for permission to use this information, please contact [email protected].
(Note: MetaCrawler does not yet report search phrases. For example, the list will not show how many times people searched for “Lost In Space,” though individual words such as “lost” and “space” might appear apart from each other. The commentary below each chart makes some educated guesses at search terms that may have occurred.)
Top Gainers
The chart below shows the top 15 keywords which have risen the most on MetaCrawler from the previous month.
| Top 15 Gainers – Oct. 1998 | ||
| Term | Rank | Change |
| pumpkin | 951 | +4050 |
| costumes | 776 | +1532 |
| laura | 224 | +1256 |
| netbus | 761 | +1118 |
| nhl | 704 | +1014 |
| pokemon | 256 | +1008 |
| revolution | 941 | +840 |
| christmas | 549 | +692 |
| halloween | 53 | +690 |
| build | 918 | +595 |
| dr | 675 | +571 |
| roman | 922 | +482 |
| egypt | 864 | +434 |
| dr. | 255 | +433 |
| marijuana | 907 | +400 |
Upcoming holidays were on people’s minds in October: halloween, pumpkins, costumes and Christmas.
Meanwhile, political scandal was exchanged for celebrity scandal, as people sought information about Dr. Laura’s nude photos.
Top Losers
The chart below shows the top 15 keywords which have dropped the most on MetaCrawler from the previous month.
| Top 15 Losers – Oct. 1998 | ||
| Term | Rank | Change |
| georges | 4477 | -3487 |
| kenneth | 3787 | -3276 |
| starr | 2107 | -2076 |
| ken | 1865 | -1466 |
| lewinsky | 1574 | -1327 |
| cnn | 1994 | -1273 |
| hurricane | 1309 | -953 |
| tennis | 1292 | -582 |
| president | 1371 | -544 |
| warzone | 1381 | -540 |
| congress | 1187 | -532 |
| monica | 621 | -451 |
| open | 999 | -406 |
| upskirt | 1354 | -400 |
| crawford | 887 | -354 |
Storms both physical and political passed from the minds of searchers in October, as terms like Kenneth Starr / Ken Starr, Congress, President Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and Hurricane Georges all dropped in ranking.