This is the last month of the year and top searches lists have begun to roll out. Yahoo and ask.com, both have revealed the hottest searches for the year as per their search engines.

At Yahoo, entertainment conquered the chart:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan

Ask.com has released version 11 of their new search engine today.

Techmeme is geared up with all the coverage of the news item, along with the main articles currently from the NY Times and News.com.

“We have rebuilt the Ask site from the ground up,” said Mr. Safka, who was earlier the chief executive of Match.com.

If you are one of the overly concerned and protective parents, who are almost always worried about your child's online experience, then there is a great news for you!

According to Search Engine Watch, Ask.com has relaunched their dedicated children's web portal, known as AskKids.com. The all new revamped AskKids displays suggested searches and images in the sidebars .

Via the Ask's Official Blog, Ask.com has announced that it will now be adding television program listings to its search engine result pages or SERPS.

According to Ask, “Our Ask TV listings uses our patent-pending technology DADS (Direct Answers from Databases) to answer queries and questions from structured data feeds and databases. DADS provides highly accurate answers to queries which are relevant to a given topic. Instead of using traditional keyword search algorithms, our technology can deliver much deeper, more precise search results based on understanding of a query meaning rather than syntactical text matching.

Ask.com has announced that, it has entered into a search deal with the online image hosting giant, Photobucket. This deal between Ask and Photobucket includes sponsored listings and other advertisements. This means that from now on, at Photobucket, instead of Google, we will find Ask powering Photobucket's search. However, most of the sponsored lisitngs would still be coming from Google.

According to MSN Virtual Earth Blog, Ask.com has let go of their mapping platform and have adopted the Microsoft Virtual Earth as its new mapping platform. Ask.com has integrated MSN Live Earth into Ask Maps, Ask City (search for Businesses, Events and Movies per US City) and their Web Search including the Bird’s Eye view.

Ask.com has announced. that it has added a direct link to its privacy policy via a "Privacy" link conveniently placed on its homepage, thus, easing the growing concerns of the privacy watchdogs. This would ensure that whosoever wants to know about the company's privacy policy would be able to do so, with the help of the direct link.

Just like the planetary alignment is a rare sight, so is the news of Ask.com updating their search index or algorithm!. Especially after their last update was a year ago. However, several posts have surfaced at Webmasters World reporting, that such an update has indeed taken place. Here are some interesting posts, to make you a believer:

Over the past weeks, a lot has been brewing at Ask.com. Rumours and speculations have been doing the rounds for sometime now. However, the most lingering doubts were regarding Ask opting for Google powered results in its search results. But we wanted to know the trust, the real thing, so we went ahead and had a conference call with Ask.com spokesman and VP, Nicholas Graham.

Yesterday, Ask laid off 8% of its search related workforce, amounting to about 40 jobs and further the Ask CEO Jim Safka announced that it will now focus exclusively on women. Now in the current updates, it seems that Ask is already serving limited tests of Google powered results in its search results.