Yahoo's Top 10 Searches for 2009

December is just beginning and we're already starting to get flooded with round-ups, tops, and the likes, all trying to sum up 2009 in a nice orderly and succinct fashion. Bing came out with its top searches of 2009 yesterday, and now Yahoo is doing the same. Normally, you'd expect some differences but for the most part things should look pretty much the same, right? Wrong, as it turns out, apart from the top search topic which was Michael Jackson on both search engines, the top 10 is completely different with not one search term shared between the two.

The top, and the major differences between the Bing one, paints a very clear picture of the ones using Yahoo Search, currently the number two search engine in the world by market share. All searches are very much media-related and many are for celebrities. This can be easily explained by the audiences of the two search engines. Bing is more popular with the tech-savvy crowd while Yahoo is more appealing to the mainstream.

Top 10 Mobile Searches for 2009

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

One missing item in particular is very interesting, Twitter, which, despite making it to number two in the Bing top, is nowhere to be seen on Yahoo's top 10 perhaps telling of how much the mainstream audience really cares about the fledgling microblogging platform. Maybe the fact that Bing has recently integrated Twitter into the search engine had something to do with the improved standing, though that alone can't account for the discrepancy. Things should get even more interesting once the two search engines merge as Bing will be powering Yahoo Search as well. The only difference between the two then will be in the way the results are presented and the domain name so it should be interesting to see how the tops will look like next year.

Yahoo's Top 10 Searches for 2009

The list is very different from Bing's own top 10