Eircom's zeitgeist

Eircom's homepage vies with Yahoo! for the title of most popular Irish site (though not everyone agrees who's top and unquestionably it's skewed by the fact www.eircom.net is the default page in many people's browser).

But nonetheless we must set some store by the interesting breakdown of searches run at the Eircom site over the past year. Depressingly, Euro bore Chris Doran was the most searched-for Irish male, followed by that astro-crank Jonathan Cainer. Reassuringly, we reverted to type when it came to women, with Paris Hilton topping the list and the rest also drawn from pop-culture's slappers.

The hottest search term of all, according to Eircom, was Ryanair (good jaysus, how hard is it to find Ryanair.com?), though, curiously, the telecom's own stats suggest Yahoo! was more popular. Perhaps there's some subtle distinction between "search term" and "site" they aren't fully explaining.