by Mike Krumboltz Is Zoe Saldana Hollywood's next big thing? With starring roles in two of the year's biggest blockbusters (" Star Trek " and " Avatar "), there's no need to consult our magic eight ball. We're going to go out on a limb and say "absolutely." Web searches on the alluring actress have soared 293% over the past 30 days, putting her among Yahoo's top 4,000 overall lookups. And with "Avatar" poised to dominate the box office,

Opera announced that five million people are using Opera Turbo , its compression technology, which is present in both Opera 10 and Opera Mobile. Opera Turbo reduces the size of Web pages by up to 80%, according to the company, dramatically improving browsing speeds over slow networks and saving money on "pay as you go" connections. Opera Turbo saw an increase of 60% in user growth in a single month, from October to November.

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. For Google, the quality of search has always been about getting you the exact, most relevant answer you were looking for in the shortest amount of time - what we call "time-to-result." These notions of relevance and speed have been baked into our product development and are always a top priority for us.

Facebook has published data on its member demographics , focusing on ethnicity (by way of WSJ's Digits blog ). By comparing members' surnames to U.S. Census Bureau data, the company estimated its ethnic breakdown, determining, "that while Facebook has always been diverse, this diversity has increased over time leading to a population that today looks very similar to the U.S. population." It comes as no surprise that the large majority of Facebook users are White. After that,

A good drive can be one of life's most enjoyable experiences. But a bad one is, of course, no fun at all, and poor directions are often responsible for making things take a turn for the worse. So Google appears to be overhauling the way in which it tells people to get from one point to another. Ever follow some computer-generated directions in a strange city? It's possible to wind up creeping along after dark, braking to peer at every street sign,

Why does the "Iranian Cyber Army" use the red star, a communist symbol from the soviet era? It's Twitter Friday again! Welcome back to my weekly column. Apparently Twitter or rather its DNS got hacked . DNS is that little thingy that assigns real Internet addresses (like Twitter.com) to those so called IP addresses or rather numbers websites hide behind. This is what we know. The rest of the story is quite questionable though.

AdMob, which is in the process of being acquired by Google ( regulators are still eyeing the deal ), has released its Novemeber Mobile Metrics report. The themes for this one are that the Launch of new devices drove Android growth and the rise of smartphones resulted in a sharp increase in WiFi usage. "The launch of new Android devices in the second half of 2009 has accelerated the growth of the platform. Six months ago a single Android device, the HTC Dream (G1),

by Claudine Zap Our top picks from the day's hottest searches. Hillary Clinton (Searches increased by 703%). The Secretary of State came to Copenhagen ready to bankroll poorer countries' climate goals. Cobra subsidy (+642%). The House of Representatives voted to extend health care benefits for the unemployed. The Senate is expected to vote today . Free Shipping Day (+556%). Unfortunately, that event was yesterday. But you can still find loads of free shipping deals .

After the video from the core team meetup was posted, the topic that seemed to get the most attention on Twitter and various community sites was Matt’s announcement that there would be a new default theme in 2010, so I thought I’d start with that as the first of the meetup summaries.

When Kubrick was bundled with core back in 2005, it was a cutting edge theme. Custom header, rounded corners, clean design… if you were using WordPress back then, let’s face it, you were impressed. Time moves on, though, fashions change, new styles become old standards, and what was once cutting edge suddenly seems old-fashioned and out of date.

So, a new bundled theme in 2010? We think it’s a good idea. Something nice and light that can serve as a good example theme, include newer theme-based features, and look nice (and current) on a public site. We’d like to introduce a new default theme with version 3.0, which is anticipated to come out in mid-2010 (hence the name), and think it would be good for it to blend well aesthetically with WordPress itself.

I’d been advocating moving toward Elastic, the theme framework/WYSIWYG theme editor that was one of our Google Summer of Code student projects, but after some discussion I agreed with the guys that while Elastic is awesome and should be promoted as a community development project, it’s heavier than a default theme needs to be. The default theme doesn’t need to be a full-featured framework, it just needs to work well, look awesome, have good code and be a good starting point for beginning themers. We were thinking of a fairly minimalist design that would make it easy to customize.

As for the code, there’s a question of if it will really be a new theme, or if it will be a re-styled and updated version of Kubrick.  We don’t know the final answer to that yet, because the ultimate decision will be made with the community’s input, but we believe all new markup is the way to go. What do you think? Without venturing into theme framework territory, are there features you think a new default theme should have? Some people have been talking about it on Trac over the past year, if you wonder what’s been tossed around so far. I thought about posting a poll here (you know how I love posting polls to gauge opinion), but in this case I think a discussion thread might be better, so that each vote can explain the reason behind it. So, have an opinion on what a new default theme should include? Weigh in at the forums.

Keyword bidding can seem like an overwhelming task: How to bid, what to bid, and when to bid - there are many variables at play. In this series ( I , II , III , and IV ) we've outlined how to start looking at your keyword performance and use key performance indicators (KPIs) to adjust your bids: 1. Using Microsoft Advertising Intelligence monetization data, you can see the average advertiser data across keywords in the Bing marketplace.