Internet bigwigs such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search are claiming that undergarment-challenged blonds Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were some of the Web's hottest searches in 2006.

But bloggers and search engine gurus aren't buying it.

		TOP SEARCH RESULTS Google's top searches for 2006 1. Bebo 2. Myspace 3. World Cup 4. Metacafe 5. Radioblog 6. Wikipedia 7. Video 8. Rebelde 9. Mininova 10. Wiki Yahoo's top searches for 2006 1. Britney Spears 2. WWE 3. Shakira 4. Jessica Simpson 5. Paris Hilton 6. American Idol 7. Beyonce Knowles 8. Chris Brown 9. Pamela Anderson 10. Lindsay Lohan MSN's top searches for 2006 1. Ronaldinho 2. Shakira 3. Paris Hilton 4. Britney Spears 5. Harry Potter 6. Eminem 7. Pamela Anderson 8. Hilary Duff 9. Rebelde 10. Angelina Jolie

Conspicuously missing from the search engines' annual rankings of the most popular queries, they say, is sex.

When search superstar Google published its list of hot topics this week, blogging naysayers clamored to pooh-pooh the results.

These annual lists, they say, are self-promoting lies drummed-up by the Web firm's publicity departments.

"All of these lists were obviously edited. There's no way sex-related key words were not in the Top 10," wrote blogger Andrey Milyan on the Search Marketing Standard Magazine's blog.

"They are all heavily filtered. That's why you don't see popular terms like 'sex' and 'porn,' " added search engine guru Danny Sullivan on his blog, SearchEngineLand.com.

Ms. Hilton and her self-described "hot-mom" cohort, Ms. Spears, dominated the rankings, which are compiled each December by several well-known search engines, including AOL and Lycos.

Queries about Ms. Hilton even topped Google News' 2006 list -- beating out cancer (No. 3) Hurricane Katrina (No. 5) and bankruptcy (No. 6).

Nowhere on the lists was any mention of sex, although a report released yesterday by research firm NPD Group noted that the bulk of downloads from video-sharing sites are adult films. Only 5 percent of downloaded videos were movies considered to be "mainstream."

But it's not as if there weren't plenty of celebrity sex filling the Web site's rankings.

Suri Cruise, the spawn of newlyweds Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, the offspring of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, were included in Google's annual review of popular search terms.

The war in Iraq and global politics didn't draw nearly as much interest from the Internet public as "American Idol," the weather and British social networking site, bebo.com, which topped Google's annual search list.

But because the Internet is big business, the annual lists of hot search terms draw incredulous response from industry insiders.

Google's list, for instance, includes MySpace, which has an exclusive advertising arrangement with the Internet titan. And none of the lists includes major competitors such as Hotmail or Amazon.

"If I were snarky, I'd be saying Google deliberately dropped out competitors," according to the blogger Mr. Sullivan, "to make a partner like MySpace look better."