I had never heard of Bebo until I read in this morning’s Washington Post that it was the most popularly googled word or phrase of the year, beating MySpace and World Cup.
When I went to see it for myself, I didn’t do what (apparently) millions of other curious internetters did; I didn’t google it. Why would I? I already knew it was the name of a website, which meant that I could just type bebo.com into my browser and go directly there.
Surely, anyone who had heard enough about Bebo (or second-place MySpace or fourth-place Metacafe) to investigate would at least know where to find it, right? Prominent web companies aren’t using members.aol.com pages anymore.
To be fair, a lot of these people probably have Google set as their home page, which makes it easier to type a four-letter word than an eight-character URL, but the vast majority are clearly just idiots.
To wit: Google also announced that Paris Hilton was the most popular News-search topic, heading a top ten that also included “Celebrity Big Brother.”