Every morning I like to visit at Google’s Hot Trends page to see what’s on the minds of searchers out there. Usually it’s reflective of the morning news, but this morning it read like a school closings report.

According to Google Press Center  "Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google, will host an interactive webcast to give reporters an early look at the fastest-rising searches conducted on Google.com in 2007."

Apple’s hot gadget, the toy world’s must-have plush pets, and arguably AOL’s hottest web property represented the top three fastest-rising search terms at Google.

The typical celebrity crises that grab lots of attention in search may have reached a point where Yahoo’s Search team has had far too much Lohan, Hilton, and Spears this year.

This holiday season, an unexpected gadget is high on the wish list, if a spate of searches in the United Kingdom is any indication. Searches for digital photo frames outpaced searches for digital cameras there last week.

We’ve run several, several stories in recent weeks about Yahoo execs leaving the company, and the departures have been, as far as we can tell, completely voluntary.  But according to one analyst, a solution to most of the company’s problems would be for roughly 1,200 other employees to involuntarily follow suit.

Google’s products and services can’t don fire gear or grab a water hose.  But people are still using them in ways that will hopefully reduce the impact of the California fires.

In celebration of Reuters’ discovery of Google Trends, we thought we’d revisit for an update. Like last year (when Google Trends was launched) Birmingham, England still has the world’s largest concentration of porn searches.

If you want to be more certain your Halloween costume is unique, it’s a good idea to follow the trends and wear something not listed. That’s how I would do it, anyway.