During the past two years as a spokesperson for Yahoo! Buzz, I’ve gotten up before dawn many mornings to speak with live radio hosts about Yahoo!’s weekly top searches. The keywords are always interesting so I never worry about having nothing to say. It’s fascinating to see each week’s Search data because it’s like peeking into the minds of everyone on the planet and seeing what they’re really thinking about. Sure, they’re definitely celebrity heavy, but people also do countless searches (such as for Middle East map or U.S. midterm elections) to better understand important news stories.

Tonight we launched Yahoo!’s Top Searches 2006. It gives you the pulse of the Web over the past year as told through the billions of searches conducted each month by millions of people around the globe. Check it out.

I don’t want to spoil anything for you by announcing that Britney Spears is the top-searched person as well as the top search overall of 2006. It’s true. Believe it or not, Britney has been the top-searched person five out of the past six years.

Radio hosts always ask me: “Why all the searches for Britney when she hasn’t even released an album this year?” Yahoo! searches reveal that celebrities don’t really have to produce hit records or movies to stay in the public eye, because people are fascinated with their private lives — especially when they’re full of—how-shall-we-say-it—“drama.” Britney’s second baby (Jayden James), her split from K-Fed, and (especially) her well-photographed stint of late-night partying with Paris Hilton drove her to the top of searchers’ minds. Interesting fact: searches for Britney Spears and Paris Hilton received 11 times as many searches than Britney Spears and Kevin Federline ever did. Just for the record, Britney was the top search of 2006 even before her recent exposure sans underpants, but the last two weeks have only enforced her stature.

A new category addition this year is Top Celebrity Baby. Suri Cruise reigned for “Suri Cruise sightings” as folks sought proof of the newborn’s existence. Her debut in “Vanity Fair” at four months helped push Suri past Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt and Sean Preston Federline for top baby honors.

Thankfully, celebrities aren’t the only thing on people’s minds. Studies often show that Americans have a hard time locating other countries on a map. It’s heartening to see our users striving to better understand important news such as the Iraqi conflict and the Israel Lebanon conflict and seeking Middle East maps. Other big news searches included the false confession in the JonBenet Ramsey case and the Danish cartoon protest. But it was the shocking death of Australian naturalist Steve Irwin that became the top news search of the year as people rushed to understand the circumstances of his death, what a stingray looks like, and how tribute would be paid to the international star.

As a devoted blog reader and longtime blogger myself for the past seven years at poprocks.com, I took special note of the top blogs of 2006, which focus on either entertainment or politics. Entertainment blogs PerezHilton, The Superficial, and Pink is the New Blog enjoy the very top spots, followed by political blogs Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Little Green Footballs.

I can’t wait to see what you’re all looking up in 2007.

Jess Barron
Managing Editor, Yahoo! Broadband

What do you do when your father’s arthritis prevents him from attending your sister’s backyard wedding? Haul out your webcam, position it outside your sib’s home office on a tripod, pray for the wind to die down, and fire up Yahoo! Messenger.

That’s what Jessica Greenhood recently did for her sister’s wedding. After learning her father wasn’t up for the trek from Florida to the Midwest, Jessica investigated ways to capture the nuptials for him. She had an old camcorder, but its battery was defunct. Finding a replacement battery in Miller, Kansas (pop: 12 houses), proved a distinct challenge, and a new camera was more than Jessica could afford.

Remembering how effective her Yahoo! Messenger webcam had been for monitoring her family’s shop after-hours, she MacGyver-ed together a low-tech, low-cost solution that brought the ceremony to her father — and tears to his eyes.

“I’m a kid in a candy store with Yahoo! Messenger. I’ve been using it for years to communicate with family and friends. Everyone lives so far away — can you say big phone bill? I’ve always found it really easy to use. Even here in Kansas, where I’m on dial-up that really only gets speeds of 24.4K,” she said.

Thanks for writing with your story, Jessica. And congratulations, Naomi and Eric!

Nicki Dugan
Editor, Yodel Anecdotal

Break out the mistletoe and bring on the eggnog! December is here and we’re kicking it off with some fresh new looks and features worth checking out.

• Dressing to impress: Yahoo! TV has gotten an updated look and feel. Whether it’s a preview of the new McDreamy episode or the latest gossip from Survivor’s last castaway, find everything you ever wanted to know about any show on Yahoo! TV — spoilers, user reviews, photos, and more. Read more here.
• The gift of mobility: Why not box up a mobile Internet experience for your loved ones or yourself this season? The Nokia 6300, 5300 XpressMusic, or 520 phones now directly connect to Yahoo! Mail and Messenger, enabling you to check and send messages, look up your to-do list, and pull up important contact info while stuck at the airport or running errands. More Nokia Series 40 phones with this capability to come.
• Look ma, no login!: Flickr just introduced a guest pass to help friends and family avoid the rigmarole of having to create a Flickr account just to see your private photos. They’ve also resuscitated their mobile site and introduced a new “camera finder” feature that lets you see what sort of photos the latest models of SLRs, point-and-shoots and camera phones are taking. Read more here.
• Be inspi(red): In honor of World AIDS Day, we’ve created a special site to raise awareness and offer ways to show your support, such as links to “red” products that will donate profits to the cause, a virtual T-shirt for avatars, and video clips about the work of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Even our front page is shouting its support with a cool red ribbon that weaves through our logo and ends up wrapped around the globe.
• Blimey, squidgy, cheerio?: Finding out the latest on foreign affairs and worldly issues just became a quick find — with a British accent, I might add. Yahoo! News now showcases a variety of up-to-the-minute BBC video clips with breakings news and top stories on business, politics, technology, health and entertainment.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

Here at Yahoo! TV, dissecting the latest shows consumes much of our day. It’s our passion, and we know we’re not alone. Last night’s episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Heroes” is the stuff of many a water cooler chat among coworkers across the country. After all, you just know Meredith is making the wrong choice, right?! And you can’t resist the urge to share!

That’s why the all-new Yahoo! TV, unveiled tonight, places a much bigger emphasis on community and letting you have your say about what’s worth getting addicted to. Bring on the social media!

There’s something so powerful about unleashing your inner Ebert and posting ratings and reviews for all to read. Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, and similar products have all had tremendous success engaging their respective communities so thousands of people can weigh in on this movie or that song.

In the new Yahoo! TV, you’ll get a chance to rate any show or individual episode (new or in re-run) as well as write your own review. We’ve also teamed with Television Without Pity to integrate their fan forums for popular shows, so you can debate to your heart’s content which season of “Desperate Housewives” had the best hairstyles.

In addition to our new community focus, we offer personalization through My TV, which lets you customize your local listings and access them through a handy mini-grid on every page. You can also easily find out when to tune in to a specific show or episode by hitting “When Is It On?.” We’ve added recommendations to help you discover shows you might have missed and made new content much easier to find, including photo galleries and video clips for your favorite shows, episode previews and snarky recaps, celebrity news and gossip, plus an all new actor database. All so you can make the most of your time in front of the boob tube.

Yahoo! TV has come a long way — but this is really just the beginning. Go have a look around and get your opinions on. We’re counting on you!

Sal Taylor Kydd
Director of Product Management, Yahoo! TV

I just returned from Central Washington, where I joined fellow Yahoos, state and local officials, public officers, local businessmen and women, and townsfolk in celebrating the opening of our newest data center.

Yahoo! is proud to have officially opened our first data center in the Pacific Northwest — a region that’s highly sought after by many technology companies. The region provides many advantages to building and hosting data centers, including low-cost power, high-speed fiber-optics networks, an optimal climate, and an incredibly supportive community.

Our facility makes use of “green” initiatives to help us efficiently use resources. We are using hydroelectric power, which is plentiful in this area, and our building uses the cold external air to cool the inside of the data center, a special design element that helps reduce electricity needs and control cooling costs.

During the ceremony, local officials, including Port Commissioner Mike Mackey and State Senator Linda Evans Parlette, took the podium to welcome us to the area and proclaim the first official “Yahoo! Day” in Wenatchee. It was a pleasure to join Chief Yahoo David Filo, VP of Operations Kevin Timmons and Wenatchee Mayor Dennis Johnson in cutting the purple ribbon (with a giant pair of scissors!) to mark the opening of the first major data center in the area.

We have more than 25 large data centers around the world, housing hundreds of thousands of servers (the engine behind all of our popular services) and other equipment that powers Yahoo!. These technology hubs (including the one we are building from the ground up in Quincy, just 30 miles east of Wenatchee) represent a new phase in our approach to data center management. Historically, we have rented space and data center management from third-party vendors. We’ve recently started taking a hybrid approach by building or leasing our own data centers, providing us with much more control over our own destiny (and data!).

This is all in the name of ensuring that your experience is exceptional and uninterrupted. Now when you send an email using Yahoo! Mail, there’s a chance it could visit the Pacific Northwest before reaching its final destination.

The Pacific Northwest has welcomed us with open arms and worked with us to make this a successful partnership between Yahoo! and these communities. I look forward to celebrating many more Yahoo! Days with them.

Lars Rabbe
SVP & Chief Information Officer

I have a confession to make: I’ve been a media junkie my whole life. Even though I spend the vast majority of my media time online these days (and oh, yes, my work time, too), I have always been a newspaper fanatic. I delivered the Rocky Mountain News as a kid and, even today, I rarely board a plane with less than three papers folded under my arm. There’s something about the portability and the discoverability of news in that format that’s always appealed to me and I continue to be fascinated by the amount of insight, aggregation, production and distribution that happens in a 24-hour period at newspaper operations around the country. While so many new media have emerged over the years — first radio, then television, and ultimately cable and the Internet — newspapers remain one of the best ways to find relevant information (news, sports, classified ads, events) about what’s happening in your own backyard.

Yahoo! is a growing force in local content, too. We’re seeing huge growth in all things local, including user reviews and ratings in Yahoo! Local, our online yellow page offerings, job listings in Yahoo! HotJobs, our great new Yahoo! Maps, access to local news and sports content right from our home page, and even through RSS feeds on My Yahoo!.

But we have a great opportunity to do more, now in concert with our new partners, a consortium of more than 150 U.S. newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Houston Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. Newspapers have always represented and connected local communities and their ability to bring physical communities online is a great complement to the virtual communities Yahoo! brings together.

What’s in it for you? We’ll have the opportunity to provide you with deeper, more relevant local content across our network from myriad sources, now including your local newspaper. If you’re a recruiter, you’ll have a one-stop shop that allows you to simultaneously place a job listing on your newspaper’s web site and on Yahoo! HotJobs. You’ll also enjoy state-of-the-­art recruiting tools and access to a larger pool of job seekers that you can more precisely target by location, industry, occupation or behavior. Similarly as a job seeker, you’ll have a larger pool of national and local jobs accessible in a searchable, easy-to-use format that will make it easier for you to find and apply for a job.

And if you advertise on Yahoo! or with any of our newspaper partners, we’ve created great new opportunities for you to reach the consumers you want through local, search or graphical advertising delivered in a more relevant, targeted way.

What’s in it for our newspaper partners? This partnership gives them the opportunity to get their content and help-wanted ads in front of millions more consumers than they can reach in their local markets, along with better search and other tools to improve the experience for online readers.

And for Yahoo!, we have the opportunity to do one of our favorite things — to better personalize your online experience and connect you to your passions and communities. I hope you enjoy the new features, as I will. But you’ll still find me carrying my newspapers with me wherever I go.

Sue Decker
Executive Vice President and CFO

Photo from thorii pablo

Dreading family overload next week? Relax, spend some “me” time and check out the goodies in this week’s round-up.

• Formerly known as…: Yahooligans! just unveiled a new name and a new look: Yahoo! Kids. You’ll find everything from the latest arcade games and seasonal jokes to an interactive study zone there. This means that now your 6-year-old and 12-year-old have a place they can both hang out and get smart online.
• Tag-teaming — who woulda thunk?: In a nutshell, Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft have joined forces to make your search experience a better one. We teamed up to provide webmasters with a free tool that helps search engines better index their sites. The result? Better search results for all. Read more here.
• Paula, Simon, and Randy reincarnated?: If winning $50,000 in pocket change, a deal to star or produce your own Yahoo! show, and national stardom aren’t enough motivation, how’s exposure to Tom Green, Ask a Ninja and Maria Sansone? All three just came aboard the Yahoo! Talent Show to judge the hottest and not-so-hot talents on the Web. If you haven’t already submitted your stellar air-guitar sets, now’s the time!
• Addicted to advertising?: A complete rebuild of Yahoo! Advertising now offers you a virtual warehouse of advertising information, including industry news, podcasts and webcasts, an event calendar, a creative gallery for watching award-winning spots, content from the likes of the Association of National Advertisers, and, of course, links to Yahoo! stuff like market research studies and advertising ops on our network. We’ve even got cartoons.
• Be there in a flash: Beta no more! Our new Yahoo! Maps are now de rigueur if you’re logging in via broadband (fear not, dial-uppers — our classic Maps will remain just for you). With an award-winning, Ajax-juiced user interface, the new maps provide multi-point routing, a mini-map to let you see the forest for the trees, satellite and hybrid views, real-time traffic, and full integration with Yahoo! Local.

See you back in two weeks. We plan to spend next Friday enjoying a tryptophan-induced coma.

The social media phenomenon is fed by human needs for self-expression, feedback, generosity, and, to some degree, good old-fashioned voyeurism. Today, we add more food to Yahoo!’s social media menu: Bix, a budding social media service that almost anyone can use to create, enter, and judge a contest. If you’re an American Idol fan, think of it as an opportunity to play the role of a Fox producer, a contestant, and Simon Cowell.

Here’s how it works: Bix contests include karaoke, dance, comedy, beauty, photography, and writing. They are either initiated by Bix members or, in some cases, by sponsors. Contest organizers call the shots on criteria and set the deadlines. Interested contestants then scan the roster of active contests for something worthy of their submission. And winners are selected by the largest vote tally.

Bix provides really cool web-based video- and audio-recording tools to make it all easy. All you might need is a webcam or digital video camera. Most computers and webcam come with built-in microphones, or you can plug in an external mic. (After all, what’s lip-synching without the hand-held?)

Social media is a playground for emerging talent. Scanning the site, I found this terrific gender-bender karaoke, some great Ansel Adams wannabes, and a video that exemplified what comedy on the Web should be. I also came across some interesting sponsored contests. GigaOM, the popular tech blog, launched a guest blog contest that promised to publish the winning entry. And in this “other” category, Six Flags Great America asked people to submit their best impersonation of a roller-coaster scream. (If you’re at work, turning down your volume has never been more imperative.)

So how does Bix fit into Yahoo!’s strategy? Bix, which was founded in January, is a young startup — not unlike Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, and Jumpcut when we acquired them. All represented emerging social media trends with great potential. Imagine where Bix’s creativity could go once we scale it to over half a billion people worldwide. For example, we’re currently looking into possible synergies with things like Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Video and our entertainment properties.

In the meantime, we’re psyched to welcome Bix founder Mike Speiser and his coworkers to the Yahoo! family. Once the deal closes, Mike, one of the founders of Epinions, will join the Communities, Communications, and Front Doors group as our new vice president of community, driving products like Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! 360°, Yahoo! Photos, and, of course, Bix.

If you need any encouragement to give Bix a try, Mike invites you to enter his contest.

Bradley Horowitz
VP of Product Strategy

No, no, you don’t need to worry about the three search engines merging and not being able to use your favorite anymore. But tomorrow, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft will announce support for Sitemaps, a free open-source software tool that allows web-site owners (from bloggers to online merchants) to make their site’s content more easily discoverable by search engines — and therefore improve your search results.

Search engines crawl the Web to find sites to add to their indexes. This essentially involves fetching a web page, extracting its content and following the links on the page to discover other pages. The search engines assess the quality of a page as well as how often it changes to determine the interval it will visit the page and update the content. Blow this up to billions of web pages and you have a search engine index that’s continually updated.

As you might expect, the crawlers have to work very hard to get so much of the content on the web. Having a content feed between search engines and publishers is a much more efficient way to discover newly created and updated content. Sitemaps allow web-site owners to create a catalog of their pages for the search engines so that search results are more comprehensive. Sitemaps also inform crawlers of content updates and new pages, so search results are fresher as well. By announcing joint support for Sitemaps, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft are putting their weight behind this new standard and encouraging all site owners to adopt it.

So, what does it mean for you? Over time, this should help improve your Yahoo! Search experience. We work hard to be comprehensive and fresh so that we can answer your queries relevantly, and this is yet another tool in our toolbox.

If you’re a site owner, please come to Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search to learn how your site is represented in our index and how to submit your Sitemaps or any other site feeds (including RSS). More technical details for site owners are available at www.sitemaps.org and on the Yahoo! Search blog.

It’s rare that you get the chance to have a headline like this, so I couldn’t resist. In fact, I believe this is the first-ever joint announcement by all three search rivals. This was possible because we all want to improve the search experience and are hopeful this bit of “coopetition” will improve your query results and (we like to believe) your lives.

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

When Michele Madansky, our VP of corporate and sales research, approached me in the halls to play in the “1st annual” Google Yahoo! tennis tournament (cleverly called “The Battle Over the Net”), my initial response was, “No way!” I haven’t played tennis since my kids were born. And surely, if we were going to enter into any sort of competition with Google, we should recruit our Division I Harvard MBA over-achieving ringers to represent us (aren’t there a few of these somewhere at Yahoo!?). When she informed me that they had 40 people and we only had 11, my fear of semi-public humiliation lost to my fear of our not showing up to a competition with Google. So I agreed.

I arrived to the Stanford Tennis Stadium in Palo Alto, California, early Sunday morning (at least there was no traffic on typically log-jammed Highway 101). I passed by the requisite tub of water, Gatorade, and beer (true); walked past the stack of PowerBars, fresh fruit, and large sheet cake with Yahoo! and Google logos on the icing (also true); and checked in and got my T-shirt (Unwritten law: When more than 50 people gather, there is always a T-shirt).

The rules of play were simple — 5-minute warm-up, eight games played, no-add scoring. A very casual process of assigning two teams to a court, and I was off to my first of three matches. During each match, we exchanged the friendly banter of “What group are you in?” and “How long have you been at the company?” All agreed this was purely for fun and a good cause. (All of the proceeds went to help the East Palo Alto Tennis and Tutoring program).

Throughout the morning, I couldn’t help but notice that the average age of the Yahoos was at least 5 years over that of the Googlers. (Maybe our wisdom and experience would be an advantage over these youngsters — both on and off the court?) Google even had a real ringer with a home-court advantage — a woman who played on the Stanford tennis team and graduated in 2004 (making those of us who have already had our 20-year college reunions feel a bit, well… “experienced”).

But in the end, Yahoo! won — 163 games to 157 games. A narrow margin, but less than one percent so at least I can sleep soundly knowing there will be no drawn-out recount. But more than the win, I actually had fun. Sure, there was healthy competition. But there was no antagonism, no resentment, no “attitude” from either team. We laughed and joked and enjoyed good tennis (here’s the Flickr photoset as proof). The Net-net (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) — a fun time was had by all.

OK, now back to the trenches in the real battle over the Net…

Kate Gerwe
Senior Director, Marketing
Yahoo! Connected Life