Celebrity bad-girl Paris Hilton and social
networking website Bebo were the hottest topics on Google
in 2006, the online search engine revealed.
The "Year-End Google Zeitgeist" top ten lists showed global interest in
online socializing and video viewing, as well as World Cup soccer, cancer,
autism, celebrities and Hurricane Katrina.
Young people's socializing website Bebo, where users share videos,
pictures and music and seek former schoolmates, ranked ahead of MySpace,
another teen-oriented social networking site, in the Google list of most
popular general searches.
World Cup soccer ranked third, with the remaining top-ten queries
focused on video sharing, radio blogging, and wikis, which are websites
open to editing by visitors.
Hilton, who starred in the reality
television show "The Simple Life," topped the list of the
most frequent Google news searches, with actor Orlando Bloom ranking
second.
Hunts for cancer news ranked third, followed by podcasting, Hurricane
Katrina, and bankruptcy in that order.
Swiss tennis star Martina Hingis was seventh on the news search list,
ahead of autism, the US National Football League draft, and the television
show Celebrity Big Brother.
MySpace topped the general searches and singer Janet Jackson the news
searches at Google in 2005.