Love her or hate her, Britney Spears fascinated people in 2007 with the
disgraced pop princess heading a list of the top 10 searches on Yahoo!.
Spears, a former Disney Mouseketeer who turned 26 on Sunday, continued to
draw attention as she shaved her head, attacked a photographer's car with an
umbrella, went to rehab, fought with ex-husband Kevin Federline over the custody
of their two sons, and released her first album in four years.
"People do not know what to expect from her any more and the searches would
spike every time she was back in the news," Vera Chan, senior editor at Yahoo!,
told Reuters.
"From when she shaved her head and rumors emerged from the rehab mill that
she was calling herself the anti-Christ and shaved 666 on her scalp, there was
constant tracking of this almost modern-day Greek tragedy happening in front of
us."
Spears has topped the annual Yahoo! list for six of the past seven years,
only losing out once -- in 2004 -- to her friend and fellow party girl Paris
Hilton. But Chan said overall the Britney Spears searches were up from a year
ago.
Hilton, however, was slipping in the search list until May when she was
sentenced to 45 days in jail after violating her probation on a previous traffic
offense.
She ended up at No. 3 on the list from No. 5 last year.
"The tolerance for her party behavior was fading but her jail sentence popped
her back up to that level of attention," said Chan, adding that scandals
broadened the search of celebrities from young women to older people and both
genders.