The death of Michael Jackson has put the former King of Pop on top of music charts worldwide, and has stirred crowds of fans to the cinemas to see footage shot in his last days alive, but has also made the star the number 1 trending topic for the past year on Microsoft’s search/decision engine. Jackson, who died on June 25th 2009, outpaced searches related to such Bing topics as Twitter, the swine flu, the stock market, Farrah Fawcett (who also died this year), Patrick Swayze (another celebrity dead in 2009), cash for Clunkers, Jon and Kate Gosselin, Billy Mays and Jaycee Dugard.

“Yes, it was quite a year and what better way to reminisce then by taking a trip down memory lane with a look back at what topped the list of Bing searches. If you’re curious how we determined the top searches, we analyzed billions of search queries and developed the list based on searches made with Bing,” revealed Danielle Tiedt - general manager, Bing.

Bing was launched in early June 2009, as a new decision engine, and new brand designed to kill Live Search. Following the availability of Live Search’s successor, Microsoft also announced that it had inked an agreement with Yahoo, through which Bing would serve as the search engine for Yahoo properties.

“Not surprisingly, we saw a lot of folks using Bing for quick access to favorite sites like Facebook, MSN, Youtube and Craigslist. We also saw a lot of more complex searches such as product related queries in which people used Bing to help decide what MP3 player to buy and travel searches to help find the best deals on a tropical vacation,” Tiedt added.

According to Microsoft, Perez Hilton, who runs a Hollywood blog by the same name is the most searched person on Bing in 2009, having bested genuine celebrities. “Megan Fox from the Transformers saga came in third on our list who was beat by our second place favorite Vampire, Robert Pattinson,” Tiedt said.