According to the released search report by Lycos, in a rare appearance for a technology event, the “Debut of the iPhone” captured the fifth-place spot in the news category. The phone was beaten by the number of searches on the execution of Sadaam Hussein, which finished first, and, in order, by the Iran conflict, the Pakistan conflict, and global warming.

The iPhone stood ahead of many searches like gas prices, illegal immigration, football player Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal, and North Korea’s nuclear situation. The iPhone has continued to intrigue Internet searchers, who can’t get enough information about the entertainment-based phone. Lycos at the same time also predicted that the “iPhone searches” will increase in popularity in the year 2008 with even more speed.

“Web users appeared far more interested in the debut of Apple’s “iPhone” than the War in Iraq, which failed to make the list of top news events for the third consecutive year”, stated in the Lycos release.

As far as the categories of most overall searches are concerned, ‘MySpace’ moved into second place, beating out perennial celebrity favorites ‘Britney Spears’ and ‘Paris Hilton’. Searches for ‘Poker’ finished first, keeping its place intact, just as they did in 2006.

“MySpace consistently delivered high volumes of search activity weekly, generating 55% more search interest than YouTube,” Lycos said.

In the “Top Fads” category, Lycos found that ‘MySpace’ occupied the second-place position, with ‘YouTube’ making a strong run in third place. Newcomer ‘Facebook’ ended in fifth place. ‘Poker’ nailed down the first-place spot, while, as an example of the range of fad searches, ‘Harry Potter’ finished in the sixth-place spot.

“Facebook will continue to heat up,” said Lycos, which operates search and technology Web sites for online communities.

With the ‘U.S. presidential campaign’ beginning to take off, Lycos also predicted that ‘YouTube’ will be a beneficiary, particularly with its political and parody advertisements.
According to the Lycos search report, most blog sites tallied by Lycos were oriented toward celebrities and politics, but sites covering consumer electronics devices broke into the top 10 blog sites. ‘Engadget’ finished in the fifth position, while ‘Gizmodo’ was ninth.

When a person clicks on the link, he or she is brought to a page which will prompt the user to install a codec that will allow them to hear music from the artiste. It’s a clever trick because it looks authentic and there is a good chance the user will think it’s some sort of special link to a pre-released song or video of some sort, which will increase the chances that they will download the codec (which is a virus) into their computers.

People with computers that have not applied the latest security vulnerability patch will get infected even more easily because the malware will download in the background, oblivious to the user. Since even legal plugins online get the prompt, those who have the update may still fall for the trick as it everything will seem like its normal.

The hack is a tad interesting though, as the effect is achieved with a simple href tag that seems to be able to create an image map of some sort, allowing it to span across a substantial part of the page. They can also position this link anywhere they wish using CSS styles, which will allow them to put it at the most effective places. Even the MySpace ads could be affected by this exploit and bring the victim to the malicious page.

Let’s hope Alicia Keys fixes it soon before her MySpace reputation is ruined. Users who aren’t updated on the news may just not trust her links anymore.