Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.

To illustrate how this works, Yahoo has created an interactive data visualization that shows visitor traffic data in nearly real time. Using it, one can drill down into specific age groups, genders and story types to see what people's aggregate reading habits look like.

You can view and play with the data visualization here. They even designed the UI in HTML5 rather than Flash so you can check it out on your iPad.

Think carefully: all six have come out in opposition to the bill, which would put tight restrictions on Internet firms in an effort to enforce U.S. copyright laws (although some firms took more convincing stands than others). At least two of the companies, Google and Amazon, have said they may go dark to protest the bill.

If you guessed GoDaddy, which had a public dust up after initially supporting SOPA, you're right. Sort of. GoDaddy's PAC leads in percentage, giving 52.9% of the $38,750 it has given during this election cycle to Representatives that have signed on to co-sponsor SOPA and Senators who are co-sponsoring PIPA.

• Microsoft $88,500 (20.9%)
• eBay $32,750 (35.5%)
• Google $29,000 (47.5%)
• GoDaddy $20,500 (52.9%)
• Yahoo! $11,000 (35.5%)
• Amazon $4,000 (42.1%)

We contacted all six companies asking for comment and requested they get back to us by 3 pm ET/noon PT on Thursday. All of the companies missed that deadline, but we'll update if any of them get back to us.

ReadWriteWeb analyzed Federal Election Commission data maintained by OpenSecret.org. While the reports are for the current election cycle, they do not list the dates of individual donations, making it hard to determine if the donations were made before or after a lawmaker signed on to co-sponsor the bills.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

Outspoken Supporters Received PAC Money

All of the donations were made in the 2012 election cycle, and individual donations ranged from $1,000 to a high of $10,000 given to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. by Microsoft. Only two SOPA/PIPA sponsoring lawmakers received donations from all six company PACs: Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved PIPA in May, has been a long-time backer of the bill and its earlier versions.

"Fake pharmaceuticals threaten people's lives. Stolen movies, music and other products put many out of work," Hatch said in a statement posted on his Web site in May. "This is why protecting property rights is a critical imperative and is why we've come together in introducing this common-sense bill."

Goodlatte, meanwhile, made comments supporting SOPA as early as April, but didn't sign on as a co-sponsor until October.

"It is tempting to think of crimes involving counterfeiting and piracy, or intellectual property (IP) theft, as victimless, but this is simply untrue," he said a day after signing on as co-sponsor. "Piracy denies individuals who have invested in the creation and production of these goods a return on their investment thus reducing the incentive to invest in innovative products and new creative works. The end result is the loss of American jobs."

Among the SOPA/PIPA supporting lawmakers who were the biggest beneficiaries of donations from the PACs of six companies analyzed:

• Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah $15,500
• Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. $14,000
• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. $12,000
• Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas $11,000
• Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif. $10,000
• Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. $7,000
• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. $7,000
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. $7,000
• Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. $7,000
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. $6,500

A complete breakdown of donations by each company's PAC to lawmakers is available.

Bing now commands 15.1% of the search market, while Yahoo has dropped to 14.5%. It's not even a full percentage point, but this is the first time Yahoo has been ousted by Microsoft for that #2 slot behind Google.

Bing has a long way to go before being considered a serious competitor to Google, but its growth is still noteworthy. It may be hard to believe, but Bing was only launched in mid-2009. The product was essentially a rebranding of Microsoft's existing search engine, which trailed well behind Yahoo at that point.

Not content to remain at below 10% of the search market, Microsoft launched Bing in a bid to more aggressively compete with Google, whose search engine had risen to dominate 65% of the search market by 2009. In addition to sporting a simplified user interface and improved performance, Bing was also found to be closely emulating Google's own search results.

Almost as rapid as Bing's growth has been Yahoo's decline. The company has been struggling for a few years to figure out what kind of business it is in a world dominated by Google. When Microsoft launched its new search engine in 2009, Yahoo commanded 20% of the search market. It has fallen five percentage points since then while Microsoft has increased its own market share by 7%.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

The OPEN Act does have some flaws, and in some points parralells SOPA, as noted by technology and law blogger Eric Goldman. Goldman notes that, like SOPA, OPEN "assumes there is a problem with foreign rogue websites that needs to be solved...and more importantly, attacking the money supply to supposed bad actors remains too blunt an instrument."

"While OPEN can't really be fixed to resolve my two structural concerns, my hope is that the discussion about OPEN will force rightsowners to provide *credible* evidence of harms that they or consumers are suffering (no more self-serving hype, please), and that such evidence will force us to think carefully about how 'rifle shot' solutions (as opposed to shotgun solutions) can ameliorate those harms," Goldman said.

Thompson, who officially starts on Monday, replaces Tim Morse, Yahoo's chief financial officer, who had been interim chief executive since September. Carol Batz was fired in September after two-and-a-half years on the job after failing to raise revenue or gain ground on Facebook, Google and other rivals.

Thompson will also join Yahoo's board of directors, which is currently looking to sell stakes in Asian Internet companies. The company may also sell a stake to private equity investors. When Batz was fired the board said it was considering the sale of all or part of the company.

At PayPal, Thompson grew revenue to $4 billion from $1.8 billion and increased the number of users to 104 million from 50 million in 190 countries.

"Yahoo! has a rich history and a solid foundation to build on, and its continued user engagement is one of the many reasons for my enthusiasm," he said in a statement. "Clearly speed is important but we will attack both the opportunity ahead and the competitive challenges with an appropriate balance of urgency and thoughtfulness."

Both sites trail far behind Google, which holds onto more than 65% of the market. While that position isn't threatened by any other search engine, it's interesting to note how quickly Bing has risen in the last few years.

It also doesn't hurt that Yahoo has been shifting its attention to things other than search and continues to struggle to figure out which endeavors would best support its business in the future.

ComScore's numbers didn't include mobile search traffic, but that will certainly be a trend to watch moving forward. Between Android's massive market share and Google's position as the default search engine on Safari for iOS, the current market leader on desktops is sure to remain dominant on mobile devices for quite some time, even if Apple does move away from Google at some point.

The mobile search game is one area where Google and Apple don't compete directly. Microsoft has a worthwhile mobile OS in Windows Phone 7, but best of luck to them in challenging both iOS and Android.

ABC's morning show Good Morning America has relaunched as a Yahoo site, and George Stephanopoulos will webcast an interview with President Obama on Yahoo and ABCNews.com today at 2:35 p.m. ET.

The announcement comes at an interesting moment for Yahoo. Last month, its board fired CEO Carol Bartz, naming Chief Financial Officer Timothy Morse as interim CEO. Yahoo and Microsoft's search partnership has not met either party's expectations, and Yahoo has lost a number of key executives in recent months.

Yahoo is still positioned as a media company, but it has struggled to find an identity, and analysts point out that media companies don't tend to do well with finance people at the helm. Jack Ma, CEO of Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, has expressed interest in buying Yahoo, which owns a partial stake in his company, but Yahoo has not announced anything specific about any mergers, acquisitions or a permanent CEO hiring.

Poynter points out that today's partnership looks remarkably like one announced in 2000 between the same two companies. The content looks different this time, but the arrangement is familiar. AdAge reports that former ABCNews.com manager Bernie Gershon said the past arrangement was "lucrative for both parties," but it lost steam due to editorial disagreements.

How do you think this deal will affect ABC and Yahoo? Let us know in the comments.

Disclosure, I worked at Yahoo from 2007-2010 as the Community Manager for both the Yahoo Developer Network and MyBlogLog.

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Bartz said she was "fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board" in an email sent to employees today. Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse will act as interim CEO until a longer term replacement can be found.

The company was already struggling by the time Bartz took the reigns and promised a new approach. The former AutoDesk CEO was hired to help turn things around, but evidently those ambitions proved too high.

As competitors like Google grew their ranks, Yahoo has had to make a series of layoffs while shuttering some of its Web properties, including Buzz, Geocities, its publisher network and its Maps API, among others. After word of its plan to shut down its social bookmarking service Delicious leaked, Yahoo ultimately decided to sell it to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, sparing fearful users the prospect of having to somehow backup a few years' worth of data.

Despite numerous changes to products and personel, Yahoo has struggled to return to its pre-2009 financial performance. Its stock price remains around $12.50, as AllThingsD points out, which is not far from where it stood the day Bartz took over.

Prior to joining Yahoo, Bartz was chair, president and CEO of Autodesk for 14 years. Before that she was VP of Worldwide Field Operations and an executive officer at Sun Microsystems.

Lead photo by Yodel Anecdotal

Update: Yahoo has confirmed Bartz departure, which is part of a larger reorganization of its leadership.

Hammer-Lahav wrote today that the service was built using Node.js, MongoDB, Express, Socket.IO, Jade, JS, HTML5 and OAuth 2.0. It included an iPhone app that was never launched. The entire package is now known as Postmile and is available on Github.

Hopefully some interesting things will come out of the Postmile source code.

Like to hack on Twitter feeds, streams and APIs? Then there's good news for you this morning. Twitter has acquired a small startup company called Bagcheck, but the real score in the deal was bringing co-founder Sam Pullara onto the team. Pullara was previously the Chief Technologist at Yahoo where he lead many of the best programs at that beleaguered but technically awesome company.

Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, Yahoo Search BOSS and other inspiring technologies that enabled hackers all around the web to roll out sophisticated mashups powered by Yahoo's backend were championed for years by Pullara. Not everyone liked him, but people who love to experiment with data have got to be excited about his coming to Twitter, the world's most promising stream of publicly available, semi-structured, real-time social data. Twitter's relationship with developers has been troubled at times, but Pullara's joining the team is the latest step the company has taken to make amends with its developer ecosystem.

What About Bagcheck?

The company Pullara co-founded may see its technology integrated into Twitter as well. Thomas Vander Wal coined the word "folksonomy" (a user-driven system of popular classification) and is a big fan of Bagcheck.

"What Bagcheck has done that is brilliant is make it easy to add things from around the web into the Bagcheck site through their 'BagIt' bookmarklet, which captures 'social objects' and keeps them well structured.

"Twitter is good (not great) for discussion of things, but is really lacking a good view of the social object, in the 'socially mediated object' sense that Karin Knorr Cetina used - where people having clear view of the object they were discussing had much better (accurate, robust, and constructive) conversations than those discussing things in the abstract.

"Bagcheck could provide that hook into social objects to bring things within clear view. This will help with resolving things like 'Which Planet of the Apes movie are you talking about?' and other ambiguous conversations."

If Sam Pullara can advance the kind of paradigm represented by Yahoo Pipes and YQL into the Twitter ecosystem, that would drop the already low technical cost of entry and greatly increase the power available to Twitter's ecosystem of developers.

Pullara can also work on big partnerships. He lead Project Hummingbird, which was Yahoo's search partnership with Twitter, but we hear he got even further with a Yahoo/Facebook partnership. Those are powerful additions to a hacker/executive resume.

You may remember when a megahyped search startup called Cuil, with tens of millions of dollars in backing, launched then faded away a few years ago? The developer that built the same interface with better performance in four hours, using Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), was Sam Pullara.

This Spring, Twitter brought on Jason Costa, former developer relations manager at both Google and Facebook, to be the new Twitter developer relations manager.

Twitter is going to need to stock up on hot developer types, because Google Plus will open an API soon and the competition for developer attention is going to be massive. That's going to be great news for developers and the users who love them.

Some people say it's too late for Twitter; that it has mistreated its developer ecosystem too much to win against any viable challenger. Time will tell, but it seems clear that Twitter isn't going to just let all the hacker attention flow to the little upstart Google Plus without putting up a fight.

But will Yahoo's efforts prove better than any of the existing services that already do the same?

Yahoo's app search debut is not surprising. With the ever-growing number of mobile applications out there, there's definitely a need for more refined interfaces that let you dig deep into app store catalogs to surface apps in easier ways than by using the tools the official stores provide. You might even say this is the next big vertical in search.

But Yahoo is joining an already-crowded field with its app search and AppSpot offerings. A number of startups are also angling for app search dominance in this area, including the likes of competitors Chomp, Quixey, AppStoreHQ, Appolicous, AppsFire, Zwapp, Frenzapp, AppBrain, Xyologic and many others.

So what will Yahoo do differently here? With Yahoo's search tools, the company says it will retrieve matching app titles and show you descriptions, price and star ratings from users. This isn't entirely unique. But it also helps you find app you might like, based on the apps you already use - similar to Genius on iTunes, or say, the app recommendations from Boxcar.

Yahoo's app search tools use its search assist technology for fast auto-completion, show related apps and provide download links, too. But nothing Yahoo has launched today stands out as a truly one-of-a-kind technological app search innovation. Instead, it's just a handful of pleasant-looking interfaces for app discovery. Of course, we'll need to put Yahoo's tools through their paces for some time before we know how they really compare to the others.

There is one thing that stuck us as odd about this whole deal: Yahoo is already a partner with Appolicious, makers of a competing product. Why wouldn't Yahoo leverage that current relationship if it wanted to get into the app search space? We're looking into that now, and will update as we learn more.

That being said, mobile video continues to see substantial increases in viewership, up over 41% from last year and more than 100% since 2009. Internet video streaming is also on the rise.

Even though Americans are consuming more video content across multiple devices, the Nielsen report does point to some interesting demographic differences in media consumption - something that definitely suggests that even though traditional TV viewership remains strong, that is likely to change.

Until the fall of 2010, Nielsen found that typically the heaviest media consumers did so across all platforms - mobile, streaming, television. But there is now a new sector that defies that pattern - a group that watches little TV but streams significantly more Internet video. Nielsen says that this is being led by the age 18-45 demographic, a group that is "significant but small." About 20% of this group spends 27 minutes per day watching streaming video online. Just as importantly, this particular group watches the least amount of traditional TV.

Nielsen says that as people age, they do spend more time watching television. But it remains to be seen as to whether or not traditional TV viewership will be the media that we turn to as we grow older.

This will change the way people design websites, it will change the way people do search marketing, it will change a lot of things. It should be very, very interesting.

Above, a screenshot of the kind of search results Google has displayed since offering its Rich Snippets markup documentation. In this case, it will be easy to know what the cooking time for this recipe is because "cookTime" is one of 10 standardized fields in the recipe schema under schema.org, so there's one standardized way to communicate cook time for a recipe and every third party indexing a recipe Web page will know what the cooking time is immediately.

Bing says of the project:

"We've made great progress on the technical front to begin to model the real world from the messy bits of data scattered across the web. Things like movies have benefitted from this work. We're now able to understand 'Casablanca' is a movie and literally mine the web to re-assemble information about that movie from millions of sites.

But we think we can do better. We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites. Rather than rely solely on machine learning and other AI techniques, we asked "what if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?...We at Bing see this as a major step forward for the web, simplification for webmasters and richer more informative search results for consumers. As search continues to evolve from finding links to taking action, we're excited about the potential this new system provides."

Here's how I understand such work: technical standards like standardized markup for content types allows search engines and other sites to skip spending time and work figuring out what kind of content is on a page and move directly to the stage of doing something interesting with that content.

It's not easy for a Web service to know that a page is about food, or wine or a movie - but if all pages that are communicate that in a standard fashion, then 3rd parties like search engines can proceed directly to building beautiful food, wine and movie search results pages or other services that present the content in a more compelling fashion. That could make searching more pleasurable and useful and ultimately drives more traffic to the most useful and best formatted sites in the search results.

The Associated Press reports that Yahoo Mail has 277 million users, down 1% from the same time last year. Hotmail is the global leader with 327 million users while Gmail has grown 24% (43 million users) over the last year to 220 million. Yahoo's announcement coincides with last week's iOS update to Yahoo Messenger as the company looks to reassert itself as an innovator and communications leader.

Yahoo Messenger with chat is now easier to use and brings Yahoo Mail much closer to GChat/Talk in terms of communications functionality. Yahoo Mail also allows users to send and receive SMS directly from their account.

We reported last year that Yahoo rebuilt its mail using CSS3 and loads with fewer images, thus reducing load times by 35%. It has also added feature applications within the inbox such as Flickr, Evite and PayPal.