In spite of being mostly knocked offline, the Web site of Arab satellite news network Al-Jazeera was among the most sought-after on the Internet last week.
The Web portal Lycos reported that "Al-Jazeera" and variant spellings became its top search term last week, with three times more searches than "sex."
Al-Jazeera drew intense interest from Web surfers after it carried Iraqi TV footage of dead and captive US soldiers in Iraq. US TV networks had decided not to air footage of the corpses. Al-Jazeera later honored a US request to stop until families could be notified, a statement from the network said.
The Internet's leading search engine, Google, said "Al-Jazeera'' was the term that showed the greatest increase in the week ending March 31. Google does not report absolute rankings of search terms.
Hackers also homed in on Al-Jazeera, bringing down its Web site early last week in what the Web host called an attack characterized by a flood of bogus traffic. Hackers calling themselves the "Freedom Cyber Force Militia" diverted visitors to the English site to a page with a US flag.
The managing editor of Al-Jazeera's English site, Joanne Tucker, said it would be back up by yesterday and that steps were being taken to make the pages impervious to hacking attempts.
Al-Jazeera is based in Qatar. It is funded by Qatar's government but is an unusually independent voice in the Arab world. Its English Web site launched last week with the aim of giving Western audiences an Arab perspective.
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