I am slowly losing touch.

Of the top 10 Yahoo searches this past year, I searched one - or perhaps not even one. I don't think I actually searched for "Barack Obama." As a semi-literate netizen and newshound I think I would have had more luck searching "not election" to add some variety to the coverage.

But that's not what prompted my post. What prompted my post is that I had never even heard of two of the top 10 searches. Here is the list with the holes in my knowledge highlighted:

1. Britney Spears
2. World Wrestling Entertainment
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

Source: Yahoo viz. BBC.

Runescape: A massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). It's killer app: It doesn't have to be downloaded. You can the full 3D game in your browser (one assumes the implied ... at work) without a single download. Oh, and that other barrier to entry - paying - they did away with that too. You can have a limited free account.

Naruto is more excusable. It is a manga comic. I don't know why the romanized version of the name was such a big hit this year. Perhaps it wasn't, and Yahoo is just aggregating from all languages. Who knows.