At ABC News, Michael Malone has an article about Yahoo’s top search results of 2006; LGF was ninth in the “blog search” category: Silicon Insider: Britney, Paris… and Saddam?

But most remarkable is the list of Top 10 blog searches.

The first surprise is that seven of the 10 are sleazy Hollywood gossip sites, with Perez Hilton at No. 1 — didn’t it break the Britney crotch shots? — followed by the Superficial and Pink Is the New Blog.

As you may remember, I wrote about this phenomenon a few weeks ago, but I had no idea it was anything more than a strange little niche business. The joke is on me.

But mixed into this list are three very different sites: the Huffington Post (4), Daily Kos (6) and Little Green Footballs (9).

Boy, I read those blogs, and I never would have guessed. A year ago, the Huffington Post was little more than a vanity site for political essays by bonehead celebrities. Now it appears to be the most popular political blog on the planet. That’s the astounding power of the Web.

Kos, an influential leftist site, is a little more understandable. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is one of the most important people in the Democratic Party these days, and his pronouncements carry a lot of weight in that world.

But Little Green Footballs, which sits on the other side of the political spectrum, concerns itself primarily with Islamofacism and events in the Middle East (along with occasional close-up photos of Charles Johnson’s bicycle).

The fact that it is on this list suggests there is a sizable audience out there in cyberspace prepared to look far deeper into the news than celebrity nipple slips and box scores.

I think it must be the bicycle photos.