Movie starlet Isabella Leong Lok-sze and Legislative Council member Leung Kwok-hung, more popularly known as Long Hair, were of more interest to the local Web-surfing public last year than the late king of pop, Michael Jackson, according to a review of internet searches on Yahoo.com in Hong Kong.
Yahoo Hong Kong managing director Alfred Tsoi Po-tak says the company's list of most-used internet-search keywords - the so-called 'buzz index' - provides 'a good representation of the city's cultural pulse' because of the Chinese-language portal's prominence. According to research firm ComScore, about 3.2 million of Hong Kong's nearly four million-strong online population were using Yahoo - which also hosts e-mail, auctions and blogs, among other things - in August.
Tiger Woods' travails came too late in the year to top buzz lists but, at a conference in the United States last month, Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz said the golfer's sex scandal was 'better than Michael Jackson dying' because it was easier for Yahoo to sell online advertisements against titillating articles than alongside morbid content.
Jackson's demise from a drug overdose on June 25 put him at the top of the global internet search charts for the year at both Yahoo and Google, which, combined, process about two-thirds of the world's Web searches.
Among the top keyword searches on Yahoo in Hong Kong last year were the following:
Isabella Leong