A review of Yahoo searches reveals global warming, celebrity meltdowns, social networking and a literary boy wizard’s final adventure captured mankind’s attention in 2007.

The US Internet giant sifted billions of searches made this year by its hundreds of millions of users worldwide to identify trends regarding what piqued people’s interest.

The results were posted on Monday at Yahoo’s website under the banner of "Top Trends in Search in 2007".

"It is really a barometer for what is interesting and relevant for the world," Yahoo director of product marketing Raj Gossain said while discussing the findings with AFP.

"We have a set of trends that identifies a culture that is really on the brink of change. There are a lot of inflection points that relate to the environment, politics, trade, and how they view celebrity."

Information about fallen Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the Middle East was the most sought-after news followed by oil prices and the activities of US President George Bush.

"People were checking the status of the war and we’ve seen more and more searches on exit strategies," said Yahoo senior news editor Vera Chan.

"People are monitoring the situation in Iran, the nuclear programme and worries of further military confrontations."

Product recalls proved to be hot topics, with queries logged regarding problems with pet food, toys, and even peanut butter.

Internet searches revealed a hunger for knowledge about global warming and ways to do something about it, according to Gossain.

Recycling, hybrid cars, solar energy, and former US vice president Al Gore, who shared a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his battle against global warming, were among top "green" searches for the year.

"These queries indicate a desire for people to take action," Gossain said. "The issue has clearly gone into the public consciousness."

The Internet was rife, as usual, with searches for information on celebrities. This year the focus was on stars whose lives were troubled or tragic.

Queries about pop singer Britney Spears topped the list, followed in succession by those about celebrity brat Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy centrefold found dead in a Florida hotel room in February.

"These stories are our pop culture Greek tragedy," Chan said of celebrity sagas.

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I’m off to try it out!

I was doing some research earlier with a friend on mispelt domain names and the ability to make a killing by registering web domain which are mispelt popular words and domains. We contacted a friend of ours who has experience in this realm and he’s actually making a small salary off this technique! I really wanted to share one or two of his domains with all of you, but he’s politely asked that I don’t and I have to respect his request.

I did some googling, to see what I could find with regards to such a topic and my first stop was having a look at the most commly misspelt words in the english language. I came across this list of mispelt words, which could be really useful.

My second stop was too see what resources there were on typosquatting, which is the practise of registering mispelt domain names to make money - sort of like cyber-squatting.

"Simple typing errors are turning into big bucks — and major legal disputes — for some companies that are trying to capitalize on misspelled domain names. The practice is called "typosquatting," and it involves registering misspelled names of popular domain names like Yahoo (stock: YHOO), Amazon (stock: AMZN), and Microsoft (stock: MSFT). Companies that register the names direct Web surfers who misspell an Internet address to other sites that make money off of the mistyped names." Read more..

Here is something interesting I read online: "Just for fun I once registered some miss-spelled popular domain names. I just wanted to see how many times a day people forgot to put the . between the www and the domain name like wwwsomesomain.com I didn’t want to do anything with the visitors so I just redirected them to the real domain and watched the web stats for the default.htm The problem was they were online banking URL’s. After about 3 months I was contacted by the legal department for one of the banks and informed this was called typo squatting, and it was Illegal. They requested that I transfer the wwwdomain.com to them. I did and avoided what could have been a bad situation. It was very stupid, my advice is not to do it, it is just not worth the problems it could cause."

That’s an interesting dynamic isn’t it?

Well, I am off to have a look and see what else I can find, leave your comments behind, it would be interesting! Hmmm, wwwfacebook.com ~ bloody typosqautters!

Google Alerts are the latest and greatest way to follow your websites publicity as well as a useful tool to track your competitors movements. With Google Alerts, you simply put a tracking device on a certain word and each time that word is found by Google on the Internet, you receive an email. I’ve been using Google Alerts for a long time now and can honestly say that it’s an incredible idea and one of the most useful tools on the Internet. It doesn’t suprise me that Google came up with it. The tool is still in beta phase, so we can only hope, even though it’s hard to imagine, that the system will get even more useful.

The first step is to setup an alert, which takes a matter of seconds. There are only four fields:

• The search term you are interested in being alerted about
• Type: Comprehensive, Blogs, Web, Video, Groups and News
• Frequency: As it happens, Once a day, Once a week
• Your email address to which the alert will be emailed

Once you have created the alert, you will be taken through to your alert management page, which really doesn’t need any explanation as it’s 100% straight forward. All the options you will need are visible on the dashboard, it’s honestly fool proof!

When Google finds your search term, it will send you an email from the source, allowing you to go and have a look. The example shows that one of my search terms is ‘imod’ and it shows where on the Internet the word was found.

It’s as simple as that, yet so darn powerful if you think about it! It’s like stalking your competitors and making sure that where they are being spoken about, that you get presence there too!