TOPIC: What Caught Our Eye in 2006?
According to the Yahoo! Buzz Index "Top Searches of 2006", Internet users searched for interesting (and predictable) terms during 2006. Without reading further, take a guess at the top search for 2006... go ahead! Read on to see if you guessed correctly...

Yahoo! users searched on all sorts of stories this year, but Britney was the biggest of them all. Despite (or perhaps thanks to) her trainwreck of a personal life, Ms. Spears took home the title of Yahoo's top search of 2006.

While the former Mrs. Federline may have been the most popular, she was far from Search's only story. ""American Idol" dominated as expected, the untimely death of Steve Irwin shocked us all, and the Iraq war remained on the minds of many. We've compiled an exhaustive list of the top searches in entertainment, sports, and news. We invite you to check 'em out.

You can look through the top searches by month or subject. And don't forget to explore the most popular questions from Yahoo! Answers or browse Flickr's photos of the year. Before 2007 arrives, join us for a look back at the best of 2006.

Article by Mike Krumboltz

And would someone please tell me why Katharine McPhee has become the hot topic? Her name as a search term has increased by 1,503%. In case you don't know Katharine McPhee is one of the hot properties from the American Idol scene. Her rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" has been played almost as much as that of Judy Garland's original recording. She wasn't the winner on American Idol, so why such a huge interest in her?
Then again, what do I know? The keywords "ebola" and "silly string" both gained more than 700% in frequency during 2006. I guess I can see why ebola would be a hot search term -- what with the Taco Bell illnesses over the past week. But, Silly String? What's up with that?!?

PS- For the person who called me an idiot regarding the Taco Bell outbreak, I never said it was ebola. I wrote "illnesses" and related that outbreak with a possible reason for the search term "ebola" increasing in frequency. READ before you go mouthing off, please. ;-)