Winning the Lotto and losing out in the Budget were foremost in the minds of Irish web surfers last month, figures published by Google this morning have indicated.
According to the search engine giant, the supplementary budget caused a huge surge in queries from people anxious to find out how badly they had been hit and searches related to the toughest budget in the history of the State increased by 1,600 per cent in April.
People living in Dublin were most interested in the forensic details of the Budget as it was the only county which recorded an increase in the number of searches for online tax calculators.
Dubliners were also the only people who continued to be highly entertained by the caricatures of Brian Cowen which briefly hung in two of the city's most prestigious galleries and searches for images of the pictures were up 100 per cent in the county last month
The Lotto jackpot topped €14 million in the middle of the month making it the fifth largest in history. The repeated rollovers prompted 70 per cent more people than normal to find out if they'd struck gold.
With two bank holiday weekends and a slight pick-up in the weather, both Google Maps and AA route planner saw increased activity while weather forecast queries increased by 110 per cent.
Sporting searches were dominated by the news that Munster would take on Leinster in Croke Park for a place in the Heineken Cup final. Once the outcome of the two quarter finals was assured, searchers turned to tickets with queries relating to ticketmaster increasing by 170 per cent.
The Golf Masters in Augusta got a similar bounce in the middle of the month with people logging on to find out the outcome of the sudden death playoff which was won by Angel Cabrera.
When news immerged that car owners without a valid NCT Cert could be liable for five penalty points, the NCT website nearly buckled under the strain of increased visitors and searches for the website increased by 450% after this announcement.
Unsurprisingly, Britain's Got Talent's caused a stir and Susan Boyle's startling rendition of a Les Miserables song was the fifth most popular search in Ireland with video sharing website Youtube being inundated with people trying to view her performance.
Top Ten Google searches
Budget 2009
Lotto.ie
Heineken Cup
NCT
Susan Boyle
Electric picnic
AA route planner
Brian Cowen painting
Tax Ireland
Britain's got talent
Fastest Rising searches
Heineken Cup
NCT
Electric Picnic 2009
Leinster rugby
masters golf
ticketmaster.ie
Munster rugby
Weather
Google maps
Twitter search
