Hurricane Earl:

• The path of Hurricane Earl: searches are off the charts on Yahoo! for “hurricane earl path” and “earl hurricane track”
• Searches for the “National Hurricane Center” are up 344% this week
• Searchers are looking on Yahoo! for “hurricane tracking map” up 366% this month

From hurricanes and earthquakes to floods and tornadoes, it’s likely we will all be impacted by the threat of a natural disaster at some point in our lives, yet the unpredictable nature of these events doesn’t mean we can’t establish a plan in advance.

Emergency Preparedness

• Searches for “hurricane preparedness” and “storm preparation” are off the charts this month on Yahoo!
• Yahoo! searches for “72 hour emergency kits” are off the charts this week
• “Portable generator” searches on Yahoo! are up 54% this month.
• Yahoo! searches for “free first aid kits,” “emergency kits,” and “emergency preparedness” are off the charts this month.

***off the charts refers to searches that received little to no searches the week/month before and are now gaining interest***

Disaster Awareness

• Yahoo! searches for “hurricane” were up 53% this month, with 59% of searches coming from men. Top states searching for “hurricane” this month are: Louisiana, Florida, Texas and North Carolina.
• Searches for “2010 hurricane names” on Yahoo! are up 298% this week, with 57% of searches by females and the majority coming from women ages 35-54. Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina were the top states searching for this term.
• Yahoo! searches for “NOAA Hurricane Center” on Yahoo! were up 240% this week.

And, as you prepare for the possibility of a Natural Disaster, Yahoo! Health shares the essentials for your disaster recovery kit, including the following items to name a few:

• Three-day supply of water for each person (one gallon of water per person each day), stored in plastic containers and three-day supply of food, such as canned fruits, vegetables, juices, granola bars and other compact items
• Kitchen items, including: a manual can opener, a mess kit, all-purpose knife, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and resealing plastic bags
• First-aid kit, including: spare pairs of eyeglasses and prescription medicines
• Fire extinguisher, Crow bar, Heavy-duty gloves
• Portable radio and batteries; solar and hand-cranked radios are available that need no batteries and are better choices for long-term storage of emergency equipment

What does this mean for you? Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web. Through today’s partnership, along with our recently announced Facebook relationship, Yahoo! is giving your online social life wings to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most across the Web. It’s part of our strategy to ensure that Yahoo! delivers the people and things that matter most to you!

Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!.

As part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant, we’re helping you zero in on what’s important to you:

• Coming Soon: Read your personal Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others — anywhere you can see Yahoo! Updates across our network.
• Coming Soon: Update your Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in your Twitter stream — we’ve made it even easier to share what’s going on with your friends and followers on Yahoo! and Twitter.
• Coming Soon: Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter. (Pssst: Publishers and developers interested in learning more about Yahoo! Updates, including publishing directly into it or using Yahoo! Buzz or the Yahoo! Application Platform as ways of driving social traffic to your site, look here , here and here.
• Coming Soon: Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates, allowing you to get a quick pulse-check on topics, trending and otherwise.
• Available Today: Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results starting today.

The real-time Search integration is available immediately, with other features of the integration to be launched later this year. Go on, give it a test flight: Go to Yahoo! Search to check out how we just made your Web world smaller, yet larger at the same time.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!

Today, six months and more than 5 million users later, we’re pleased to share that we’re opening Yahoo! Buzz up so that you can “buzz up” content from any publisher on the Web.

We started with about 100 publishing partners, which quickly grew to more than 400. Sites like Salon.com and GigaOm immediately saw an impact as their traffic soared when content climbed up the list and got selected for Yahoo.com. Now that benefit can come to any site online, making it possible to give as much visibility to extraordinary content from an obscure site as major news stories from big publishers.

What does this mean for you? Anything you find on the Web is now buzzable. Any of the Web’s best current event stories, gossip, photos, videos and more can be submitted and shared on Yahoo! Buzz. You’ve already seen the “Buzz Up” buttons on many of your favorite sites, including New York Times, Us Weekly and BoingBoing. Now, as any site is able to add our button, you’ll have even more places to buzz to your heart’s content. And if you don’t see that button on a Web story you just have to share, you can submit a story right on Yahoo! Buzz. Like always, the more unique and compelling the story, the better chance your story of choice will buzz up to the Yahoo! homepage. Nice!

And for anyone publishing Web content that was not part of our beta testing, today we hope you will join Yahoo! Buzz and let our audience (of more then half a billion people!) buzz up your content, too. Joining is as simple. Just grab code from our Buttons page and paste it into your website or blog.

Thank you for continuing to make Yahoo! the place you start your day to find and share the most popular stories and videos on the Internet. We have more to come for Buzz, so stay tuned. But in the meantime: keep on buzzing!

Tapan Bhat
Senior Vice President of Front Doors, Communities and Network Services

P.S. Now that you have a Web full of info to buzz, check out the My Buzz Activity page that allows you to keep track of and share what you’ve buzzed up or down, or what you buzzed before anyone else did.