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SAN FRANCISCO – Michael Jackson’s stunning death made him Yahoo’s biggest star this year.
The quest to find out what happened to Jackson in his final hours June 25 and celebrate his legacy elevated the late entertainer to the top of the Internet company’s annual breakdown of the most frequent online search requests.
The self-proclaimed King of Pop ended singer Britney Spears’ four-year reign atop Yahoo’s search rankings.
The list is meant to provide a reading on our cultural pulse. It might not be the best barometer, given that Yahoo Inc. ranks a distant second to Google Inc. in Internet search. Google plans to release its own list of popular searches this month.
As usual, people using Yahoo’s search engine in 2009 seemed to be most interested in celebrities and other diversions, even against the sobering backdrop of the worst recession in 70 years.
Besides Jackson, other new entrants on Yahoo’s Top 10 list this year were: No. 2, “Twilight,” the vampire story that has spawned two movies; No. 4, Megan Fox, the actress in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”; No. 8, Kim Kardashian, part of a family in a reality TV series; and No. 9, NASCAR.
The other half of the list consisted of 2008 holdovers. They were: No. 3, WWE, or World Wrestling Entertainment; No. 5, Spears; No. 6, Naruto, a character created for the Japanese art form known as anime; No 7, top-rated TV series “American Idol”; and No. 10, RuneScape, an online video game.
President Obama made the list in 2008 as a presidential candidate, but fell off after he took office in 2009.
