Unlike yesterday’s Google Buzz launch, Yahoo’s event doesn’t involve any major announcement. We’ve seen a few brief recaps of minor recent additions to Yahoo’s search features, and gotten some quick previews of features in the works. The most interesting of the latter demos was of an iPhone app that lets you draw an outline with your fingertip on a map to indicate a geographic area, then get local results–for instance, to find restaurants on the waterfront.

Here’s a lousy photograph of the feature in action:

Yahoo says the goal is to let people search as easily as kids draw with an Etch-a-Sketch–it calls this feature “sketch-a-search.” As someone who spent a lot of time with an Etch-a-Sketch in my youth, the metaphor doesn’t quite make sense: The defining feature of the Etch-a-Sketch is that it’s hard to get a picture out of it that’s anything like the one you might have in your head. (It’s a lot of fun to try, though.)

I do like Sketch-a-Search, though–I’ve certainly spent a lot of time on the iPhone and other phones futzing with maps and having trouble zooming in to the geographical area I care about. I tend to end up either with the entire United States or a one-block radius, when what I really want is a region of half a mile or so.

Yahoo didn’t have anything to say about when or how they’ll make Sketch-a-Search available to consumers.

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MySpace: bad news, iMeem fans.

Apple reveals iTunes store bestsellers.

Mozilla’s Thunderbird 3 e-mail ships.

Dragon voice recognition on iPhone.

Samsung’s Bada platform: details, please!

Facebook shutter Beacon, pays up.

Who gets your Facebook info?

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Yahoo’s blog post about the news doesn’t provide a whole lot of detail, but it says that you’ll be able to (A) share Yahoo features such as photos, article comments, ratings, and more via your Facebook activity stream; (B) benefit from “richer experiences” on services such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo Sports; and (C) update your status message on Facebook or on various Yahoo services. I’m assuming/hoping that you’ll also be able to log into any Yahoo service with your Facebook credentials, although the post doesn’t explicitly say so.

It’s a pleasant surprise to see a Web player as big as Yahoo turn on Facebook Connect. Even if the decision stems in part from Yahoo’s somewhat fragile condition and resulting willingness to behave in ways that a super-ambitious, Web-dominating monolith would not. (What do you think the chances are that Google will turn on Facebook Connect anytime soon?)

The more time I spend online, the more I realize that I don’t want multiple, fractured collections of friends, family, and acquaintances stored at various destinations around the Web. I want one well-organized, close-to-comprehensive database of people I care about. For a lot of us, that data lives on Facebook. The more places we can get to it, the better. And a Facebook-enabled Yahoo gives me a pretty tantalizing reason to consider using Yahoo services instead of comparable ones from Google, Microsoft, and other Yahoo rivals.

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After the jump, lists from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com–sadly but unsurprisingly, the gent to the right hit number one on three out of the four charts. And just for the heck of it, I’ll tell you about the searches that bring folks to Technologizer, absolutely none of which involve deceased celebrities, reality TV, or infectious diseases.

Google’s Zeitgeist lists mostly track the fastest-riding searches–those that received the biggest increase compared to 2008. The list is very, very international–in fact, I’d never heard of four of the ten terms until now. (I’ve linked to explanatory material, just in case you’re as out of it as I was.)

Fastest Rising Google Searches (Global)

1. michael jackson
2. facebook
3. tuenti
4. twitter
5. sanalika
6. new moon
7. lady gaga
8. windows 7
9. dantri.com.vn
10. torpedo gratis

Yahoo put together a particularly ambitious year in review package, with lots of lists (even one of Obama-related queries). They appear to focus on the U.S., though–and don’t seem to be as trend-based as Google’s–so there are fewer surprises. (It’s worthwhile to be reminded of what a surging sea of Americans find worth searching for, I guess.) There was only one search in the top ten that mystified me.

Top 10 Overall Yahoo Searches for 2009

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

Bing released just one list–of “Trending Topics“–and while Microsoft didn’t explain its methodology or scope, it’s a very U.S.-centric lineup. (Or at least I assume that the entire planet isn’t deeply interested in Cash for Clunkers, Jon and Kate Gosselin, and Billy Mays.)

Top Bing Trending Topics

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twitter
3. Swine Flu
4. Stock Market
5. Farrah Fawcett
6. Patrick Swayze
7. Cash for Clunkers
8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
9. Billy Mays
10. Jaycee Dugard

Ask.com stuck true to its answer-centric roots and released a list of the most-asked questions (in several categories). The overall list includes questions which are smart to ask, ones that probably shouldn’t be asked, and ones that are pretty much unanswerable.

Ask.com’s Top Questions of 2009

1. How much should I weigh?
2. How do I get out of debt fast?
3. How do I get pregnant?
4. What is Twitter?
5. What is Miley Cyrus’ phone number?
6. What is the meaning of life?
7. When will the world end?
8. How long does marijuana stay in your system?
9. What are the symptoms of Swine Flu?
10. What time is it?

After perusing all these top tens, I was inspired to publish one of my own. Here’s a list of the queries at the above search engines and others that have brought Web searchers to Technologizer in the first eleven months of the year. I’ll betcha you couldn’t have predicted most of them.

Technologizer’s Top Ten Searches of 2009 (So Far)

1. Swoopo (this article by Ed Oswald is one of our all-time hits)
2. Windows 7 download
3. Gmail down
4. iTunes Home Sharing
5. AT&T strike (this post, also by Ed, has received 300 comments to date)
6. Google Toolbar for Chrome (there’s no such thing, but people look for it every day)
7. BlackBerry Storm vs. iPhone
8. Celebrities on Twitter
9. iPhone tethering
10. Verizon Droid

I wonder if anything will happen in December to dramatically skew any of the full-year results…and if any of the search engines will update us if it does?

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The company did say the Internet Archive was archiving content from the GeoCities servers, however there’s no guarantee it would have every page.

Yahoo announced its plans to do away with the service back in April of this year. The company said at the time that “we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways,” and suggested those that would like to continue hosting with Yahoo migrate their websites to one of the company’s paid hosting plans.

Either way, its sad to see GeoCities go, even though the service now is a far cry from its heyday in the late 1990s-early 2000s. Chances are if you were an Internet geek at that point, you at least had one website on the service. I know personally I either created or lended a hand in creating at least three.

I wonder if it’s still there? I’ll have to search. Would be a nice trip down memory lane…

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TechCrunch’s Leena Rao is reporting that Yahoo Mail is suffering a widespread but non-universal outage at the moment. Yup, I can’t get in to my account, but the first person I asked to check was fine.

Rao also says that Yahoo Mail is the most popular Webmail service, with over 300 million users. Let’s see if this glitch attracts even a meaningful fraction of the attention that the smaller-but-higher-profile Gmail’s hiccups prompt…

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If you showed an alien this ad, he (she? it?) would come to the conclusion that Yahoo is a place where nobody’s old, bald, fat, or ugly–and where nobody uses computers. Whatever problems Yahoo has, they don’t avoid a shortage of users; I think it’s less about encouraging folks to use the site and more about attempting to glamorize the Yahoo name and remind marketers that a heck of a lot of folks use Yahoo for all sorts of purposes everyday.

Fair enough, I guess-but the emphasis on personalization (“It’s You”) feels like it’s still catching up with the reality of today’s Internet, where there’s hardly anything that isn’t really customizable, and where stuff created by real people is a primary attraction almost everywhere. If you stripped out the explicit Yahoo references and told me this was an ad for Windows Live, I’d believe you.

Your thoughts?

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This I do know: Yahoo search is still stuck in an odd limbo. If it’s going to be Binged, I hope it happens expeditiously. But as a mere user of Yahoo rather than an investor, I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t prefer to have Yahoo and Microsoft continue to duke it out with each other as well as with Google to build the best possible search engine.

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Microsoft was prosecuted in the 1990s for abusing its monopoly position in the desktop operating system market, so it comes as no surprise that the company is operating under the long shadow of government regulators. However, in the search engine area Microsoft is playing underdog to Google, which comScore reports held 64.7 percent share of the U.S search market in July.

In comparison, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo have a combined 28.2 percent share. If the deal is approved, Microsoft will be in a position to claw its way up to compete with Google. The company is rumored to be preparing to launch an upgrade to Bing before the end of the month, and is spending profusely to promote Bing.

The only people who have any right to be upset about the deal are Yahoo’s shareholders. Shortly after the deal was announced, some shareholders began to cry bloody murder over Yahoo’s use of the Bing search engine for nothing in return.

Further, Yahoo did not receive an upfront payment to make the deal happen, as many Yahoo investors had hoped. The deal’s complexity also makes it unlikely that any company other than Microsoft will be able to acquire Yahoo over its 10-year duration. None of that concerns the DOJ.

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Herewith, seven press releases that turned out to be less than prophetic–all in excerpted form for the sake of brevity, and all annotated with the facts as they actually transpired in the days, weeks, months, and years after the releases hit the wire.

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