• by January 16, 2006

For those of you who are working on this day celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr., the folks at Yahoo!'s Buzz Log-Search Spikes and Trends today report on the diverse queries on every possible variation of Dr. King's name.

Searchers appear to be interested in any photos, quotes, speeches, and video of those speeches, particularly the "I Have a Dream" speech. They're also busy looking for background on King's assassination and anything associated with civil rights topics. For example, Buzz Log recorded traffic spikes for the phrases "civil rights," "civil rights movement," and "martin luther king day 2006."

The Buzz Log also reports big search spikes on the following people and topics related to Dr. King: Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, the KKK, Jesse Jackson, Frederick Douglass, Nelson Mandela, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Gandhi, and Thurgood Marshall.

Yahoo! calculates a subject's buzz score by determining the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for a particular subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.

Yahoo! also has something called the Tech Buzz Game, a fantasy prediction market for high-tech gadgets, concepts, and trends. This feature enables people to actively participate in predicting the technologies we will be searching the Web for in the future. It's a pretty cool search feature and one that promotes active consumer engagement. We like. See for yourself: http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/