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Top Search of the Month: Olympics

Highlighted by historic performances from U.S. swimmer (no. 2 search) Michael Phelps and Jamaican sprinter (no. 22 search) Usain Bolt, it comes as no surprise that "Olympics" was the top search throughout August. Every Olympics has a few special moments, but many of the storylines in Beijing were exceptional (Phelps, Bolt, "The Redeem Team," gymnastics battles/scandals, beach volleyball, etc.) and kept users consistently searching throughout the Games and beyond.

Quick Hits

• No. 3 Little League World Series: The LLWS garnered the third-most searches in August and featured many great moments, including Mexico pitcher Jesus Sauceda's 12-K perfect game against Italy and new champion Hawaii's sound defeat of Mexico in the championship game.
• No. 10 Helmet Clash: One can't be sure of how Uni Watch's Paul Lukas would have voted, but SportsNation spoke loud and clear with its votes favoring the 'Noles "spearheaded" design over 'Bama's minimalist classic crimson in College Football Live's battle of collegiate headgear.
• No. 16 Manny Ramirez: At the beginning of the month, the July 31 trade deadline deal for Manny had users searching to find out where the All-Star slugger would end up, but his offensive production since he arrived in L.A. has kept users searching for him all month long.
• No. 20 Chad Johnson: Whether it's his trade demands, challenges to beat other athletes at their own sports, injuries or a legal name change, Chad Johnson, I mean, Chad Ocho Cinco, just can't stay off users' minds and consistently remains a top search.

Surprise Search of the Month: Alicia Sacramone

There's always so much emphasis on winning gold during the Olympics, but U.S. gymnast Alicia Sacramone's performance against China in Beijing highlighted how difficult it is when athletes' mistakes contribute to their team not winning. Though the U.S. women still won the silver, Sacramone blamed herself and her mistakes for costing them the gold. It seems many users related to Sacramone's situation and wanted to express their support as evidenced by the amount of conversation replies in the stories about her (more than 1,000 combined) and the volume of searches. After only receiving 27 searches in July, Sacramone is August's surprise search with more than 3,700 searches (an increase of more than 13,700 percent).

The Complete Top 25

Maalek Marshall is ESPN.com's Search Editor.

Note: The results listed are the summation of actual search results that were manually typed in by site users of ESPN.com in said month of 2008. All prelinked searches (including columnist archive links) were excluded from this summation.