On the brink.

The online hysteria died down, only to be revived with the author's revelatory afterword about late schoolmaster Albus Dumbledore.

In another fictional realm, we bid arrivederci to three made-for-TV families: "The O.C." suburbanites who put Orange County on the pop culture map; the East Coast "Gilmore Girls" who showed mothers and daughters how to be friends; and the New Jersey crime family "The Sopranos," whose abrupt fade to black sparked outraged demands for a less oblique ending.

In the real world, political farewells didn't make the top-10 searches, but the departures of Press Secretary Tony Snow, Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales did manage to register some buzz in 2007.

Had not President Gerald Ford, actress Adrienne Shelley, singer Gerald Levert, and godfather of soul James Brown died in 2006, the notables would have made this year's list of the top 10. A posthumous movie, album, and wrangling over wills prolonged the Buzz grieving process. As for interest in the late president, the release of Ford's 2004 Washington Post interview, in which he aired his disapproval of the Iraq war, spurred searches.

Among those who passed on in 2007, Iwao Takamoto was hardly a household name, but we paid him high tribute after the animator was revealed as the creator of Scooby Doo and other beloved cartoon characters. Shock propelled us to seek the whys behind a comedian's suicide, a grand champion's fatal stumble, and in particular a model-turned-reality-TV-star's accidental overdose. Anna Nicole Smith's unexpected turns in life seemed only the stuff of Hollywood scripts, and her death made her a bizarre, tragic figure of near-literary proportions.

Finally, in that curious intersection of the real world and the fictional, the assassination of comic-book character Captain America, who was gunned down after defending his civil liberties, was too laden with symbolism to ignore. His death provoked a strong Search reaction, although plans for his legacy to continue are in the works. After all, as one of the higher-ups at Marvel Entertainment noted, "Everything is possible in the world of make-believe." The same can be said for the world of Search.