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Yahoo has released its year-end list of top Web searches, which identify the trends form the past year. There are a number of lists available, including the top overall searches, top searches by country and top searches in a number of verticals, like finance, sports, questions and "obsessions" (hot items throughout the year).

But we're most interested in the top mobile searches, of course, and how those search trends compare to Web search in general.

Random Hacks of Kindness, a weekend-long hackathon to create disaster risk- and response-related software solutions, will be held at locations around the world Dec. 4-5. Volunteers will get the chance to work with disaster response professionals to create hacks that change the world. Google, Microsoft, NASA, The World Bank and Yahoo are the founding partners of the event.

Last night 500 Startups co-hosted an event called Inbox Love on the Google campus that brought together a number of entrepreneurs and companies who are working in the email space. The night featured several ignite talks, starting with Google's Stephanie Hannon who gave a post-mortem on Google Wave's attempts to revolutionize email and ending with Facebook developer Joel Seligstein who spoke about Monday's launch of its new messaging system. Being in company like Facebook and Google may be a little daunting for startups who too are attempting to address some of the problems surrounding email.

But if you need still more reasons why launching an email startup may be an uphill battle, Bijan Marashi can list them for you. Marashi is the co-founder and former CEO of Xoopit, an email indexing service that was acquired by Yahoo last year.

Yahoo! Mobile has teamed up with the second largest mobile applications store, GetJar, to integrate mobile apps into its search engine results. Starting now, users conducting searches on their mobile phones via m.yahoo.com, will see a separate section called "apps" which will feature relevant results from GetJar's collection of over 75,000 downloadable applications.

Yahoo! developer Tom Hughes-Croucher has released a free preview of his forthcoming O'Reilly Media book Up and Running With Node.js. The preview consists of the first approximately 20 pages of the book in PDF form.

Starbucks announces the launch of the Starbucks Digital Network today. Powered by the free Starbucks WiFi, the digital network offers exclusive content to its in-store customers. Built in HTML5, the content is designed to work on all mobile devices - from notebooks to smartphones.

The network's content includes news, entertainment, business, and health channels, as well as local neighborhood information. Content providers for the network include Bookish Reading Club, Foursquare, GOOD, LinkedIn, New Word City, and The Weather Channel. And you'll be able to get access to special content from The New York Times, iTunes, and WSJ.com, the latter of which normally sits behind a paywall.

"What do you think about Dapper?" That was the question it felt like everyone asked me for weeks after I wrote up a startup called Dapper.net on TechCrunch in the Summer of 2006. "Create an API for any website!" was the company's unofficial slogan. Almost no one understood exactly what could be done with this powerful point-and-click tool, but everyone I talked to knew it was exciting.

Last week the company was acquired by Yahoo and brief press coverage of the deal called Dapper simply a semantic advertising platform. It was so much more than that, especially for me. Dapper set my imagination on fire, it powered acts of community management magic and it helped me meet Neil Young in person. We spent many long nights together. Four years after I first wrote about it, I still bring Dapper up in conversation frequently - but for a while now it's been part of a story of heartbreak and caution.

Every now and then a product comes along - either from a startup or as a project within a larger company - that seems to meet a worthy need but just doesn't find its legs. Sometimes great ideas are pushed on us too quickly, or are ahead of their time, and other products capitalize on this market months and years down the road. As senior associate Andrew Parker pointed out Wednesday on his blog The Gong Show, this is precisely what happened with the Q&A service boom we see flourishing today.

Have you ever just wanted to point your app at a service and get immediate gratification for the location of a string of text? How about for an entire website? The good news is there is more than one way to get there.

Let's take a look at a couple of ways to accomplish this goal.

A Yahoo! engineer has reached a new cloud computing milestone. Using Hadoop, Yahoo! cloud computing engineer, Tsz Wo (Nicholas) Sze has determined the computation of π (pi) to the two quadrillionth decimal. And it equals zero. It's the most amount of bits ever calculated for pi.

This is a remarkable achievement and shows the power of distributed systems for crunching big data.

It's also an example of how data is changing our infrastructure as we discover new ways to develop applications with greater computational capabilities.