Yahoo!’s Buzz Index has been around since the early days of Yahoo!. It is a leading website for analyzing search trends on the Yahoo! network and packaging those trends into daily posts on the Buzz Log.
The data for the Buzz Index is collected from Yahoo! Search log files. The Yahoo! Buzz Index counts the total number of people searching for specific subjects. Individual users and their searches remain completely anonymous.
The Yahoo! Buzz Index is published Tuesday through Saturday. All the rankings on the Yahoo! Buzz Index are updated each weekday and reflect the traffic from two days earlier. For example, Wednesday's Buzz Index reflects Monday's searches and clicks. (Twenty-four hours are required to process data and verify results.)
A subject's buzz index score is the percentage of users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. More precisely, each point is equal to 0.001% of users searching on Yahoo! on a given day. For example, a buzz index score of 500 for "Pokemon" translates to 0.5% of all users searching on Yahoo! For buzz movers, the number displayed is the percentage increase in the subject's buzz score from the previous day.
Company names (such as Yahoo!), utilities and formats (email, MP3), and general terms (movies, downloads, football) are filtered out by the editors of the Yahoo! Buzz Index. The editors' goal is to list subjects that are interesting to the broadest possible audience. To this end, terms related to adults-only content are also excluded. In some cases, the editors might also exclude terms that they believe have been elevated by similarity to unrelated popular terms. For example, the movie The Rock might be excluded if the buzz was determined to be solely generated by interest in the WWF star, The Rock.
The Buzz Log continues to thrive on the all-new Yahoo! Buzz, and can be found here. The Buzz Log publishes new posts every day, calling out stories and topics that have "buzzed" throughout a given day. If you want to visit the original Buzz Index website, please check it out here.