Don’t have the time to scan them all? Here are the highlights of the most popular searches on Yahoo! in 2009:

Top 10 Overall Searches

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

Top 10 Celebrity Farewell Searches

1. Michael Jackson
2. Farrah Fawcett
3. Patrick Swayze
4. Natasha Richardson
5. Jett Travolta
6. Billy Mays
7. David Caradine
8. Steve McNair
9. Jade Goody
10. Ted Kennedy

Top 10 Sudden Fame Searches

1. Jon & Kate Gosselin
2. Erin Andrews
3. Susan Boyle
4. Kris Allen & Adam Lambert
5. Nadya Suleman (aka Octomom)
6. Carrie Prejean
7. Mark Sanford
8. Portuguese Water Dog
9. Falcon Heene (aka “Balloon Boy”)
10. Sonia Sotomayor

Top Finance Searches

1. Coupons
2. Unemployment
3. Stimulus Plan
4. Cash For Clunkers
5. Student Loans
6. IRS Refund
7. Foreclosures
8. Government Jobs
9. Bernard Madoff
10. Health Care Bill

“Market Darlings” Related Searches

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Hulu
4. Bing
5. iPhone
6. LinkedIn
7. Dollar Stores
8. Palm Pre
9. Rosetta Stone
10. Kindle

Top Yahoo! Mobile Searches

1. Megan Fox
2. Mobile Games
3. Michael Jackson
4. Movies
5. Rihanna
6. Mail
7. Lady Gaga
8. NFL
9. Ringtones
10. iPhone

Top Obama Searches

1. Obama Inauguration
2. Obama Biography
3. Obama Speech
4. Obama Stimulus Plan
5. Obama Family
6. Obama Health Care Reform
7. Obama Approval Ratings
8. Obama Facebook
9. Obama Overseas
10. Obama Dramas

Among the other must-read lists: Top Travel Destination Searches 2009, Top Viral Videos of 2009, and the Best Bloggers of 2009.

*Michael Jackson highlighted for effect, as he crossed over several categories.

Back to: This Is It: The Most Popular Searches of 2009 >>

In addition, there’s more Top 10 lists spotlighting different content around the network aimed at different usergroups including Yahoo! Food, Shine (women’s channel), Tech, Green, Shopping, Travel, Games, Movies, Music, Local and Hot Jobs.

Top 10 overall searches on Yahoo.com

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

Clearly, Britney Spears was not satisfied with missing the top of the list in 2007, so she had to beat out president-elect Barack Obama. Spears’ well publicized mental health problems kept Yahoo buzzing early in the year, and bouncing back with appearances on “How I Met Your Mother”, a new album and three MTV awards kept her in contention for top honors.

Barack Obama, however, surged ahead as the headlines pronouncing him the winner of the election became the most clicked stories on Yahoo of the year.

Entertainment juggernauts like World Wrestling Entertainment, video games (RuneScape) and anime (Naruto) snuck in slots between live action lookers like Alba, Jolie, Lohan and Miley Cyrus. The battle of the Davids on American Idol brought the reality show back to its former glory in the eyes of Yahoo surfers, and broke records on iTunes at the same time.

Yahoo’s Top 10 news stories in 2008

A mix of human interest stories that captivated attention, from the disappearance of young Caylee Anthony, to the shocking story of the ‘Pregnant Man’ and Swayze’s public battle with pancreatic cancer. Natural disasters and the toll taken on human lives in the middle east keep world affairs at the top of searchers’ minds.

1. Hurricanes
2. Caylee and Casey Anthony
3. Election 2008
4. Pakistan
5. Pregnant Man
6. China
7. Iraq
8. Shelley Malil
9. Patrick Swayze
10. Afganistan

Political power struggles

Looking back at the wild and crazy election year, nothing should come as a surprise at this point. People searched for Sarah Palin at first because she was an unknown, and just wanted more background on her, but then the twists and turns of the campaign (including the Fey funnies) catapulted her to fame, drawing more interest than her running mate. Clinton was the first serious run at president by a female candidate, so she secured herself a decent slot in the top political searches.

Ron Paul’s grassroots efforts gave his name a ligitimate chance to be heard, and moved him up in the power play. While politicos may have been interested in John Edwards endorsement of Obama, it’s more likely that Edwards’ affair with a former campaign staffer and rumored love child.

California Governator may have bumped out VP-elect Joe Biden, despite the fact that Schwarzenegger never took an active role in this year’s campaign. Rudy Guiliani’s run for the Republican nomination is surprisingly absent, while Romney’s more serious play for the ticket most likely put in him on this list.

1. Barack Obama
2. Sarah Palin
3. John McCain
4. Hillary Clinton
5. George Bush
6. Ron Paul
7. John Edwards
8. Mike Huckabee
9. Arnold Schwarzenegger
10. Mitt Romney

Shining bright in Beijing

1. Michael Phelps
2. Leryn Franco
3. Serena Willams
4. Kobe Bryant
5. Shawn Johnson
6. Jennie Finch
7. Misty May Treanor
8. Ronaldinho
9. Alicia Sacramone
10. Nastia Liukin

Whomever said ‘to the victors go the spoils’ didn’t have Olympian Leryn Franco in mind. While the javelin thrower and beauty pageant winner could only muster a 51st place finish, she had the last laugh with more searches than the beach volleyball duo of Kerri Walsh and Misty-May Treanor. Treanor had a slightly unfair advantage in the race for most searched Olympians, since she appeared on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” immediately following Beijing, the reality competition’s stable of fans likely kept her moving forward.

Fond Farewells

Saying goodbye in spades of online searches, several personalities passed on this year, and shocked the world with the sudden deaths of Oscar winner Heath Ledger and “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert,  as well as comedian Bernie Mac’s death due to complications of an autoimmune disease, which also fueled searches to learn more about sarcoidosis, Yahoo readers also noted the passing of a golden girl, Estelle Getty, as well as several of Hollywood’s golden gentlemen, including Paul Newman and Charlton Heston, among the list:

1. Heath Ledger
2. Bernie Mac
3. Paul Newman
4. Randy Pausch
5. George Carlin
6. Estelle Getty
7. Tim Russert
8. Brad Renfro
9. Isaac Hayes
10. Boyd Coddington

Look through the entire 2008 Year in Review on Yahoo!

• During the past week, Barack Obama has been the subject of more than twice as many queries as John McCain.
• A week ago, there were six times as many searches about Cindy McCain compared to Michelle Obama.
• Geographically, on a queries per capita basis, John McCain is getting most of his search interest from Washington, DC, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, and others. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is a hot search topic in Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and others.

Yahoo also compared the search volume of the two presidential candidates head-to-head in five key states:

Perhaps best of all, Yahoo says it’s seeing a “surge in look-ups for information pertaining to voter registration.”

This was largely due to the fact that if your content got the most “buzz” it had a chance to be featured on Yahoo.com, which can send millions of visitors to your site over a short period of time.

Of course it didn’t take long for people to find themselves at Yahoo’s first major Buzz-kill.

The program allowed only a small handful of around 300 sites into the program, so the motivation was not there for most users to participate in the site when they could not even submit their own content.

Users that were in the beta program quickly found that getting votes and making it to the Buzz popular page had nothing to do with being featured on Yahoo.com, and they probably had a better chance at winning the lottery than getting featured.

That’s because “Human editors pick the best of the stories with the most buzz and can place them on the “Top Buzz” page or, more importantly, the Yahoo homepage.” However, this meant that it was their decision, and not the buzz users voting, that determined what buzz was and what deserved to be on the Yahoo.com front page.

When Buzz finally opened the site up to all users on August 18, 2008, there was a lot of excitement for users to install the new buttons and start try to get their own content popular in Buzz — with the hopes of being featured on Yahoo.com.

Again, it did not take users long to realize that they had an even smaller chance of having their content featured on Yahoo.com than before the program opened its doors to all users and sites.

Not only was it hard to find a single example of a non-Yahoo property being featured on the front page, there was no clarity to the algorithm and system within Buzz. Some stories would receive hundreds of votes in upcoming and never show on the popular section of Buzz, while other stories were prominent on the popular page with no votes at all.

This only added to users confusion and resulted in many people losing interest with the site.

As of October 28th, 2008, if you visit the front page of Yahoo.com you will notice that the bottom right content in the “Featured” box contains a story from a non-Yahoo property.

So, finally, Yahoo Buzz has lived up to their promotional pitches to feature any content that gets enough “buzz” on the front page of Yahoo.com.

Or at least that’s what it seemed.

Typically when you visit the “Seen on Yahoo.com” link from the Buzz site, you are shown the recent stories that were featured on Yahoo.com, thus the title “Seen on Yahoo.com.”

However, when you visit the “Seen on Yahoo.com” page now, you are shown a list of sites that are indeed popular, but not necessarily featured on the Yahoo.com home page. Of the hundreds of non-Yahoo stories listed in the “Seen on Yahoo.com” section on the 28th alone, only 4 or 5 were actually featured on the front page.

Additionally, the only sites that have been actually featured on the Yahoo.com front page are high level authority domains such as Consumerist, SFGate, and Wall Street Journal.

So the question still remains… Is Yahoo’s Buzz really just a Buzz-kill?

Brent Csutoras is an internet marketing consultant, who specializes in social media, viral and search engine marketing.

Yahoo Buzz launched in February of this year as a Digg competitor. It was locked down to about 100 publishers and grew to over 400 since then. Yahoo said they have over 5 million users that have participated in the site. But now, any user can submit any web page on the web.

Publishers can get their Yahoo Buzz buttons at http://buzz.yahoo.com/buttons and any user can submit content to Yahoo Buzz over at http://buzz.yahoo.com/submit.

Search Engine Land has been part of Yahoo Buzz almost since it launched, so feel free to Buzz this up.

Indeed, in the past three or so weeks since the initial Microsoft bid, Yahoo has:

• Launched Yahoo Buzz

• Introduced Yahoo Search Monkey
• Acquired Maven Networks
• Introduced Yahoo Live
• Previewed an impressive new unified advertising platform (Apex)
• Upgraded and expanded Yahoo Video (video is also coming to Flickr)
• Introduced an open-source infrastructure (Hadoop) for its search index

The company also laid off 1,000 employees.

Yahoo President Sue Decker said at the same IAB event that the Microsoft bid “accelerated conversations that were out there,” in reference to News Corp., AOL, and Google partnership/merger conversations.

Meanwhile, last Friday Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson again made the case for a Micro-Hoo combination and sought to allay concerns about layoffs and duplication at the combined company. But some shareholders and others are starting to question whether Microsoft should continue to pursue Yahoo. Microsoft’s shares have lost close to 15 percent since the bid was announced.

On the other side, Yahoo now faces multiple suits from shareholders for not accepting the Microsoft bid and for proposing a plan to offer “golden parachutes” for Yahoo employees, a kind of “poison pill” for Microsoft in the event of a takeover.

Pundits and others have argued that Yang has not had sufficient resolve and took too long to execute on the professed strategy of making Yahoo the internet’s “consumer starting point” as well as an open platform. However, the company seems to have found resolve and focus amid the crisis. Indeed, it often takes crisis to motivate action.

Before the crisis eases and things calm down, however, the intensity of the drama will only increase. Microsoft’s now hostile takeover effort and proxy fight requires it to install a new board, which is sympathetic to the bid. It will accordingly nominate a new slate of potential directors on March 13. It needs the backing of a majority of shareholders to elect the board.

I’m guessing that a range of institutional shareholders has informally told Microsoft they will support the proxy fight or Microsoft wouldn’t have gone down that path. I’m speculating, however.

It’s terribly ironic that it took Microsoft’s bid to, in effect, wake Yahoo up. And while nobody can predict the outcome with certainty, which has grown more hazy in recent weeks, Yahoo for the time being seems to be back on course.

At launch, Buzz is said to have stories included from nearly 100 publishers. A future program will allow other publishers to participate.

It’s not clear if content is automatically submitted or if this happens only when a Buzz Badge is added to a story and used by readers at a site to submit to Buzz. How searches are used to weight particular content also isn’t clear.

My assumption is that Buzz looks for popular searches in key news categories, then runs an actual search against stuff submitted to Buzz to generate an initial list. Users can then review the list and vote items up or down. The number of times an item is emailed from Yahoo to someone is also a key factor.

We’ll likely take a closer look at the service in the near future. You can learn more about it via its help pages here; you’ll find related discussion here on Techmeme, and there was a post (now gone, at the moment) from Yahoo here.

Note that the "old" Yahoo Buzz — a long-standing feature that shows the most popular searches on Yahoo — remains. It has a new name, "Buzz Log," and moved to a new location. (Two, actually. The first uses the new Yahoo Buzz look. The second maintains the old-style look-and-feel.)

Yahoo Buzz will be similar to Digg, but will start only with 100 sites allowed into the system. After the initial beta period, all sites that are accepted into the Yahoo Publisher Network will be allowed to be added to Yahoo Buzz.

By looking at the screen captures, it appears that each article is given a “buzz score.” The buzz score seems to be generated by users clicking a “buzz it” icon. In addition, on the right side of Yahoo Buzz stories are recent “Top Searches,” which are updated hourly.

Yahoo Buzz is currently a blog with data on top keyword searches from Yahoo Search. Here is the current Buzz FAQ, but reportedly, this new site will replace the current Yahoo Buzz section.

Let’s not forget that AOL’s Netscape tried to go the Digg route with Netscape.com but ultimately failed.