No. 1: Elin Nordegren
Elin Nordegren was a golden girl, the sweet-faced Swedish blond enigma betrothed to golf’s dreamboat. Few knew who the beautiful Stockholm native really was until a tidal wave of sex scandal came crashing down around her little family. We have sparse biographical info about most sports wives. Former model Nordegren…
Madness Behind the Method (and credits)
Since 2001, Yahoo! has dived into the search stream to come up with our annual lists of lists. Some 631 million people visited yahoo.com this year, which gave us quite a bit of information to work with … a billion or so searches, in fact. How do we do it?…
Video: Top News Stories of 2010
The year in news — confounding, terrifying, and compelling. Extreme weather and natural disasters brought life to a standstill throughout much of the world: earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, volcanic eruptions in Iceland, and record floods in parts of America and Asia. Manmade disasters in mining and oil drilling also…
Stops, Starts, and Stalls: A Look Back at 2010
Heady anticipation, angry frustration, and the buzz of a vuvuzela. Welcome to a look back at 2010, a year of starts, stops, and stalls — and we’re not just talking about the auto recalls. These were tough times, yet some truly spectacular and innovative events happened. Some things came to…
Video: Inspiring Moments of 2010
A solar eclipse. An underdog’s win at the Super Bowl. A soldier’s homecoming. These and other inspiring moments of 2010 stood out all the more in the drumbeat of bad news. From sports, which yielded more than its fair share of spectacular victories, to the bittersweet news of the last…
No. 7: Elizabeth Warren
If the financial crisis and recession of the past couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that we’re all in this together. You or a family member lost a job. College has become too expensive. Credit card debt is never-ending. Foreclosure is a legitimate threat. Plenty of people would…
Beginning and Ending with a Hero
The hero quest is perhaps outrivaled only by the quest for heroes. Among the many stories that resonated on the Web in 2009, heroes ranged from the first black president to tea party patriots, from the jockey who rode in two historic horse races to the female policewomen who helped…
Two Tweet-Stories for the Holidays
Thank you to the many who summed up their year in a 140 characters or less with #myyearyahoo. Some were so compelling—and reflected so much of what all of us were undergoing in 2009—that we had to dig behind the scenes a bit more in a post. So many continue…
A Year at the Movies: Screening Race
Did the country wake up on the morning of Nov. 5, 2008, to a post-racial America? The ascendence of the first black U.S. president, Barack Obama, had pundits talking up a supposedly color-blind electorate. Of course, that might have been optimistic, but Obama’s role as the country’s leader may have…
Tiger Woods, Most Searched Athlete
He may be Athlete of the Decade, but Tiger Woods’ off-course prowess is what has landed him the title of Most Searched Athlete of 2009 on Yahoo!. Before Thanksgiving, Woods barely made the top 20 list, which is about the same position he had in 2008. Then, his smashed Cadillac…