Al-Jazeera more popular than sex

While Arab news network Al-Jazeera had its new English-language Web site knocked offline last week by hackers, it was still the most popular search term last week on Lycos, with three times more searches than “sex” — showing that Web surfers have a strong interest in reading diverse news sources on the Iraq conflict. Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera found another way to keep getting its news out despite its Web woes — it launched a subscription service that sends brief news items in Arabic or English as text messages to cell phones.