• San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, December 15, 2008 10:46 AM

Perhaps The McCain Campaign had a point with its TV ad comparing Barack Obama to celebrities like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. According to the two top search engines, Yahoo and Google, Spears and Obama were the two most-searched people in 2008.

Also at the top were World Wrestling Entertainment, Sarah Palin, The Republican Party, Fox News, Miley Cyrus, Facebook, and iPhone. The results were different for each search engine: Spears was No. 1 on Yahoo, but failed to even register with Google. Obama was No. 1 for Google and No. 3 on Yahoo.

If the results are any indication of what's on the public's mind, it would seem we're almost as obsessed with politics as we are with the most frivolous of pop culture minutiae. However, methodologies differ among each of the search engines, accounting for the significantly different results. For example, the No. 1 term for Ask.com for 2008? Dictionary.

Read the whole story at San Francisco Chronicle »