Bieber fever afflicts nation: Pop star most searched person of 2011

Did Bieber fever get the best of you this year? Join the club. The YouTube sensation and current cause of adolescent ague was the most searched person of 2011 on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Bieber beat out 2010 Bing champion Kim Kardashian for the top spot. But don’t feel bad for the soon-to-be-divorced reality star; Kim still nabbed the number two position and was the most searched female of the year on Bing.

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President Barack Obama, however, barely cracked the top 50 — the man at the top plummeted to the bottom and placed 49th on the list of most searched people. Last year, Obama dominated the leader board in the fifth position, but this year he fell well behind the likes of Jennifer Aniston (third), Lindsay Lohan (fourth), Jennifer Lopez (fifth) and Britney Spears (sixth), in terms of cultural relevance as defined by search queries.

Even Selena Gomez, girlfriend to the search-almighty Biebs and newfound tech investor, bested the president and secured the 11th spot on the list. What that says about our society or means for Obama’s odds at reelection are yours to unravel.

Bing aggregated billions of search queries to also uncover the most searched news stories, sports stars, musicians, consumer electronics, TV shows, movies, celebrity events and destinations of 2011.

On the consumer electronics side of things, Microsoft’s Xbox reigned supreme — which is not exactly a shocker considering that Bing is a Microsoft property and Kinect was a big hit with gamers. Amazon’s Kindle took second place, Sony’s Playstation nabbed third, the iPhone 5 — that chimeric phone that may one day come into existence — was fourth, and Apple’s iPad came in as the fifth most searched consumer electronics device of the year.

The Casey Anthony trial, somewhat surprisingly, trumped Osama Bin Laden’s death as the most searched news story of the year, and Tiger Woods was still the second most searched for sports star (Maria Sharapova ranked first) of the year. Continuing on with pop culture phenomena, the royal wedding topped Bing’s most searched celebrity events list, while Kim Karadashian’s extravagant (but ill-fated) wedding came in third for the year.

Of course, Bing only accounts for roughly 15 percent share of the U.S. market, so the search engine’s 2011 analysis only partially reflects the nation’s predilection for Justin Bieber.

[Justin Bieber image via Shutterstock]