For Spears, the hits just keep coming - in online searches, that is

We're about to finish up a year that included a riveting and historic presidential election and the gravest economic crisis in decades.

And the top search term on Yahoo for 2008: Britney Spears.

Just like in 2007.

And in 2006.

And in 2005.

If the year-end search list is a measure of our collective digital brain, what does it say that our MRI keeps reading "Britney"?

During the past year, the 27-year-old tormented pop star was hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation, settled child custody with her ex-husband, made a documentary about herself and released a song that quickly became the most downloaded by a female artist.

The Top 10 list wasn't all celebrity gossip. "Barack Obama" was the third-most searched term in 2008. But the rest of the list reads remarkably like the year before, and the year before that.

The second-most searched term was WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment, the pro wrestling league. After Obama, fourth was the teen sensation Miley Cyrus. Fifth was RuneScape, a popular online adventure game. Sixth was the actress Jessica Alba, who also shows up on many "sexiest women" lists, which often goes hand-in-hand with high search appeal. Naruto, a Japanese cartoon, was seventh. Lindsay Lohan and Angelina Jolie, other actresses whose real-life soap operas are more fascinating than their film roles, were eighth and ninth. And American Idol, the eight-year-old reality show that America can't stop watching, was 10th.

Other search engines' top requests are much the same. Google hasn't yet released its year-end "zeitgeist" - German for "spirit of the time" - but last year's was topped by American Idol, YouTube, Spears, the 2007 Cricket World Cup and Chris Benoit, the pro wrestler who killed his wife, his child and himself in a murder-suicide. AOL Search in 2008 was led by American Idol, NASCAR, Spears and the Flat Belly Diet.

The lists would support the argument, in many people's minds, that the Internet has helped fuel a celebrity obsession that's "dumbed down" the culture.

Vera Chan, a senior editor at Yahoo, doesn't dispute the fascination with fame, but thinks the process of the Internet search favors the ubiquitous Spears, who has become practically a brand for celebrity dysfunction. And the pop star hasn't exactly invented the genre: The seductive pairing of fame and fall predates her and the Web by centuries.