• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 2, 2011

After news broke Sunday night that U.S. special forces had killed Osama Bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, searches on Yahoo for "Osama Bin Laden" spiked 98,550%, followed by Sept. 11 at 1,009% and President Bush at 302%. The coverage in Pakistan and interest in the country also continue to rise. Searches for "Pakistan newspapers" rose 160%, according to a Yahoo spokesperson.

Across Yahoo properties there has been a "huge" spike in searches for maps of Pakistan and Afghanistan and images of anything related to Osama Bin Laden. Searches on "Pakistan map" spiked 2594%, and searches on "Pakistan news" leaped 610%.

Yahoo's "off the charts" searches, such as "911 Attack," "911 Conspiracy" and "Obama Speech/Address," which received little to no interest the week or month before, continue to gain momentum.

Twenty-five percent of Yahoo searches for "Osama Bin Laden" come from those under age 24. Overall, searchers want to know "who was Osama Bin Laden," how did Osama Bin Laden die," "how old was Osama Bin Laden," is it Usama or Osama," and "is Osama Really dead." Searchers also want to know Bin Laden's height, the location of Abbottabad, which U.S. special-forces unit killed him, was he on dialysis for kidney failure, and why Al Qaeda hates America.

Searches on how the news will impact U.S. President Barack Obama's approval rating rose 119%.

Google searches identified by Google Trends tell a similar story. Searches on "Osama Bin Laden Dead" remain the hottest search across Google properties. Related searches include osama bin laden, cnn, osama bin laden killed, osama bin laden dead body, and bin laden.

While Yahoo and Google follow search trends, the Internet technology credited for breaking news goes to social media site Twitter. No one argues that the first tweet broke the news of Bin Laden's death, which should naysay marketers' and advertisers' insight into the power of Twitter and social media.

Who broke the news remains the only discrepancy. The New York Times reports the first scoop came from Keith Urbahn, once chief of staff for former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He tweeted: "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn."

Early Monday morning, Urbahn tweeted that his source was a connected network TV news producer and that stories about the first tweet were "greatly exaggerated."

Digging a little deeper, Urbahn's story wasn't the only one to tell of the first encounters that ended up as a Twitter tweet. The Wall Street Journal reports that Sohaib Athar, the IT consultant from Lahore, Pakistan, who goes by the Twitter name @ReallyVirtual, tweeted about a helicopter hovering overhead at 1 a.m., explaining the "rare event" for Abbottabad. In subsequent tweets, Athar wrote about the onslaught of filtering Gmail emails coming to inquire about the experience.

@ReallyVirtual, who became an instant Twitter celebrity at age 33, now holds the name of the " guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it." Athar's blog describes him as having 18 years of programming experience and seven years of parenting.

PeopleBrowsr identified some tweets from Indonesia with mixed sentiment -- skepticism toward the news being real, mixed with sympathy in some cases and celebration in others. Aside from Indonesia, Jodee Rich, CEO at PeopleBrowsr, has been tracking Twitter streams from France, Egypt and other countries. Other tweets originating from France criticized the long war that led to Osama's death. The platform allows users to drill down to specific cities within regions.