Your list and the ones in the comments of the places you linked to (which I visited before coming back here to comment) are much more comprehensive and inclusive but by no means exhaustive. Still, it gives people a place to start. Well done.

There are all sorts of reasons to research people. Even the definition of “popular” depends on some sort of context. It doesn’t seem to me that “context” can be adequately defined to suit, much less “popular”.

I was in Costco the other day and there were two books which *completely horrified me. One was a thumbnail of something like 750 great artists (as if THEY were all that there had ever been); and another was 750 great writers (as if THEY were all that had ever been). It was as if the “creators” of the extremely abbreviated thumbnail biographies in these two overpriced paperbacks were whomping out “Cliff Notes” for public school term papers, for people too lazy to develop an interest in a genre of human endeavor and then limit it to their own blind-committee definition of “elephant.”

I think your additional names are great. I hope that the site you mentioned continues to add women’s biographies, provide links and reading resource lists for more on the lives and fields of endeavor of not only the women you mentioned, but many, many more!

Be well!

Also, as a part of a few women-only listservs, one of which does have to do with tech issues in part, it’s interesting to see this and consider how we could contribute to making some of the women more prominent and well-known. You can see I keep a widget about notorious women on my sidebar – maybe something like that could come from the lists of women who aren’t in the top 100.

Anyway – I’m not in SEO and have only a rudimentary understanding of it (which is probably why my blog doesn’t show up much on “femisphere” lists – I just write and don’t pay much attention to the other stuff – not proud of that, but only so many hours in a day!) but the About.com list definitely helps highlight the pros and cons of measuring “top” that way!

Thanks again. I subscribe to several About.com emails and the Cleveland About.com Guide is a good friend of mine – I think you all do a great job.

So, there are some on your list that aren’t on mine that I was disappointed weren’t more popular among web searchers — like Victoria Woodhull. Because I took datapoints over several years, some newly-popular women like Rachel Maddow don’t make the final cut. Most of the women you list WERE either on the list as I published it, OR were ones that I included on my draft list for the research behind it.

Others you list are there. Zora Neale Hurston is there, as is Annie Oakley, Sojourner Truth (she’s even higher in popularity this time of year), etc. And many more of the women you mention are documented on the About.com women’s history site — which is not just about the most popular women.

Thus, the list you found is more a temperature-taking of which women the world currently cares more about — and judgment about who’s left off (unless it was someone I forgot to check — always possible) is about the public’s interest, not mine. Believe me, I’d rather more people cared about some of the others who didn’t make the list!