Well, I hope everyone enjoyed their time watching some guy get sentenced to four years in prison this afternoon (it only took the judge three of those years to explain the ruling!). Now it’s time to get back to things that really matter. Namely, looking over stats to find out what really matters. That’s what the folks over at Bing have done. They’ve compiled a list of the most popular searches of the past year and separated them into categories like “Most Searched TV Show” and “Most Searched Celebrity.” And, guess what? You’re totally going to be shocked about what the “Most Searched News Story” was!

Actually, let me correct that. If you just wasted your entire morning watching people talk about Michael Jackson’s doctor, you probably won’t be that shocked.

In case you haven’t yet noticed, you now have to scroll an extra three inches to get to the comments section on our posts. Yes, this does mean that it will take you 0.09 seconds longer to be able to tell your fellow Mediaite readers why they’re wrong but, don’t worry, there is a good reason for this! In that space we have now included the Bing Search Box, a tool designed to help open the world of the internet, enabling you to find better proof as to exactly why those readers are wrong. Progress!

Now that the wave of 2009/end of the decade retrospectives are over, it’s time for predictions for the year to come. Wired co-founding editor and current Federated Media CEO John Battelle has a particularly thought-provoking set. Among the most intriguing: that in 2010, web search won’t quite die off, but it will deteriorate such that people “question search’s validity as a service.”

Google appears to have reached a deal to placate content providers: users accessing more than five articles via the search engine over the course of a day can be routed, directly from Google, to publisher payment or registration pages. Here’s why that matters at the ground level:

After enduring mountains of mockery at the hands of bloggers for saying he wants to get his sites off Google, word has gotten out that Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation is in talks with Microsoft. Talks that involve taking News Corp content off of Google and putting it on Bing. And getting paid for it. Who doesn’t understand the Internet now?