By Mark Ward BBC News Online technology correspondent

The annual statistics from search engines such as Google offer an insight into the year's events and obsessions. It took TV cook Delia Smith 30 years to become a noun, adjective and verb. But it has taken less than five years for the online search engine Google to do the same.

TOP FIVE GAINING QUERIES

Spider-man Shakira Winter Olympics World Cup Avril Lavigne

Google has become indispensable to many web users and the verb "to google" as well as the words "googling" and "googlism" have entered the language.

The search engine has become such a part of web culture that statistics on the 55 billion queries carried out on Google in the past 12 months offer a snapshot of the year's events, as well as net-users' current obsessions.

The top gaining query of 2002 was Spider-man, with the film's stars Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst proving to be a draw online as well as in the movie theatres.

Nostradamus: Prophet warning

The top declining query of 2002 was Nostradamus, the 16th Century French astrologer and prophet, who rose to prominence again after 11 September 2001 when several fake stanzas attributed to him did the rounds.

On Lycos, Nostradamus dropped from number 9 in 2001 to 309th. Did he see that coming?

Evidence that the net is the province of the young is plain to see, and not just because Spongebob Squarepants is popular with Google users. Computer games and pop stars feature heavily in the year's most popular queries.

A bit saucy

The continental drift of the popularity of Spain's Las Ketchup can be traced via a handy chart that Google provides.

In January some prescient souls in the UK and the US were looking for the band, but their popularity really started to take off from March.

As spring turned into summer, net-users in Italy caught on to the pop phenomenon and at the same time, interest peaked in the US. In September, the band went massive in Germany and steadily grabbed attention in the UK.

Eminem's acting debut helped fuel interest

Despite this huge success, Las Ketchup did not make the list of the top music acts searched for in 2002 - these instead were the likes of Metallica, Nelly and Shakira.

According to Google, the Colombian popstress was steadily popular all year and was only topped by Jennifer Lopez and Eminem. Mr Mathers was the most searched for musician of the year and the most searched for man in both text and image form.

Among British stars, our top man was Gareth Gates, closely followed by David Beckham. Mr Posh was also the number two man in Japan, and he was top searched for athlete overall.

A life online

The top brands of the year held some surprises. Top of the list was Ferrari - no real surprise there - but Nokia came in at three, Ikea at five and cut-price airline Ryanair was the 7th most searched for company.

The term "tattoo" continued to be popular

Perhaps not surprisingly, the French steered their own course. The top searched for brand in the country was the French railway SNCF, which was the most popular query in the country overall. French net-users were also keen on free text messages and jobs via ANPE.

With technology searches, MP3 beat all comers to the top spot, edging out Xbox and SMS.

Given that in some countries half the population is online, it surely won't be long before online life will be an accurate mirror of real life, rather than the isolated snapshot it is now.

And when that happens the geeks will truly have inherited the Earth.

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