Yahoo Proves Barack Obama Still Less Popular Than Britney Spears

Today is the day when Yahoo releases its 2008 Year in Review describing what search terms were most popular among Yahoo users in the year that is coming to its end. To me the results are not surprising at all and the only thing that is both unexpected and disappointing is that Britney Spears has managed to keep the absolute search leadership to herself while Barack Obama only managed to climb to the third position – even despite his recent overwhelming victory in the presidential race. But I guess it is quite difficult to compete with Britney Spears who has been the most popular search term on Yahoo for 7 years out of 8.

Otherwise everything is predictable as people searched for various things related to the most important events of the year – Olympic Games, politics, and financial crisis. The financial meltdown has managed to accumulate enough popularity to get to a high level of popularity even during the relatively short period of time that it has lasted (short for now, I mean). Probably seeking for some distractions people searched for various entertainment things, like wrestling (WWE at top 2^nd position), video games (RuneScape at 5), and anime (Naruto at 7).

The results prove once again that a “celebrity” is a celebrity because people are actually very eager to get to know information about this person everywhere they can – be it tabloids or search engines. So the majority of the people in the list of top 10 search queries on Yahoo are actually celebrities, including Britney Spears herself, Jessica Alba, Lindsey Lohan, or Angelina Jolie (see a trend, no male names here?). And the rising stars also seem to be of high interest to people as internet users searched for “American Idol” that can be a symbol of all the emerging celebrities in the country.

Another interesting thing that I could hardly fail to notice as a woman myself is the number of the most influential women who made their appearance in the search results thanks to politics (as opposed to female celebrities or business women) – Sarah Palin (who has been every web publisher’s favorite for quite a while this year due to the immense interest of audience), Hillary Clinton, Tina Fay (also thanks to Sarah Palin as she portrayed Sarah on “Saturday Night Live”), Michelle Obama (understandable as the country needs to know everything about the wife of the man they just elected President), and Katie Couric (political newscaster).

And while I am kind of happy about the changing role of women as shown by Yahoo searchers, it is kind of disturbing that none of the most popular technology brands (like iPhone or the T-Mobile G1 phone or Yahoo itself given multiple speculations surrounding the Microsoft – Yahoo acquisition or search deal) or technology personalities (Steve Jobbs sounds like a good candidate to me, at least) managed to make it to the top searched for topics and it kind of shows once again that if you want to make money blogging writing about celebrities or at least politics is much more promising than writing about internet companies or even gadgets.