by Mike Krumboltz The Buzz Log aims to cover the biggest and most popular stories on the Web. Lucky for us, there was no shortage of stuff to write about in 2009. From the mysterious Chupacabra to the first lady's short shorts, from a 19.2-pound newborn to the fastest mammal on earth, we stayed busy. No, sir, never a dull moment... What is that thing? Proving that you're never too old to believe in imaginary animals,

Real-time search is, appropriately enough, going to become quite visible very soon. Google announced today that it's rolling out real-time features, and the comprehensiveness of this effort is almost unprecedented as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are all onboard. Google's list of partners doesn't stop there; FriendFeed, Identi.ca, and Jaiku are also cooperating. Plus, standard blogs, news sites,

Google announced a bunch of new features today. Let's dive in: Real-time integration See the latest tweets, blogs, news etc. You can click on "Latest results" in the search results or the "Latest" link in the Search Options panel in order to get more results for a given keyword/phrase. Hot Topics on Google Trends This feature is similar to "trending topics" on Twitter. This is not the same as "Hot Trends" launched in September .

Last week, Bing unveiled Streetside imaging but you may have noticed it's not quite extensive. Hold your horses. These things take time. Bing is partnering with Navteq to get some more imaging done. Navteq is already traversing roads all over to get the best info for maps. So, Bing is simply attaching cameras to their vehicles to capture the imaging. Pretty clever. The vehicles will be outfitted with the Microsoft Vexcel UltraCam.

Over 100,000 business have been selected as "Favorite Places in Google." Over 9,000 cities and towns in all 50 U.S. states are included. The businesses are being sent decals they can place in their storefront windows. The decals include a barcode, known as a QR code, that can be scanned by smartphones, including iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. When the QR code is scanned, it will take the user directly to the business's Place Page on Google Maps . There you can get coupons,

Search engines are constantly evolving and marketers need to know how to leverage the various aspects of search to have successful campaigns. (Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos . Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.) Justin Merickel, Vice President, Marketing & New Product Development, Efficient Frontier, said SERPs are changing and have become more focused on images.

Today Google unveiled their new Real-time Search under the Latest Results box which is now another factor in Google "Universal" which entails web results, news results, images and sometimes blogs within Google Search results. Google's Latest Results help bring the social conversation from Twitter, Yahoo Answers, blogs and other social media outlets into one manageable box in the Google results page,

Online holiday spending has reached $15.3 billion, a 4 percent increase over the previous year, according to the latest report from comScore. The most recent week saw three individual days surpass $800 million in spending, led by Cyber Monday with $887 million in spending, matching the heaviest online spending day on record. The following Tuesday nearly matched the Cyber Monday total with $886 million in spending, while Thursday, December 3 reached $808 million in spending.

Building on the great feedback we received after the launch of the Yahoo! Video Search music refiners last month, we are launching even more entertainment refiners today. These two new refiners will help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies. You can see that the left rail on our video search results page is becoming a place where you can use new ways to explore online videos. By hooking into the "Web of Things,

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the availability of reporting on consumer Internet usage for Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The addition of these three markets brings comScore's measurement capabilities to 41 individual countries as part of its comprehensive global measurement platform.