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Year in Review 2013: How it's made

Miley Cyrus reacts after performing "Wrecking Ball" at the 41st American Music Awards in Los Angeles, California November 24, 2013. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson (UNITED STATES - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT) (AMA-SHOW)

Each year, as the snow flies and the holiday flyers begin to appear in our mailboxes, the editors at Yahoo Canada set our sights on one of the year’s most intensive, and entertaining, experiences: putting together the annual Year in Review.

Yahoo’s Year in Review is like no other – and not just because it’s endorsed by Ron Burgundy. Our methodology is simple, but unique. We look at the raw search data  from Canadians across the country  all year long, and apply editorial curation to ensure the final lists represent not just the terms Canadians were searching for, but the stories behind those search terms as well.

When dealing with such a disparate amount of data, it’s not always easy to decide which subject goes into which category.  Nowhere was that more evident than in our number 1 term: Miley Cyrus. Sure, Cyrus is a celebrity, and an argument could be made that she belongs on the Top Celebrities list instead. But when we looked at her body of work (pardon the pun) in 2013, it was evident that Cyrus transcended simple celebrity; she was an inextricable part of the zeitgesist that was 2013.

Consider: thanks to Cyrus, ‘Twerking’ was entered into the Oxford online dictionary; her performance at the MTV Awards in August set off a prolonged debate on the merits of ‘ratchet culture,’ and online parodies not only set YouTube records, they brought the forgotten Chatroulette back into the spotlight, if only briefly. Is Miley Cyrus just a celebrity these days? We think she’s transcended that post, and it’s reflected in our lists.

Similarly, there were cases where it would have been easy to omit an entry, but we chose not to ignore the facts behind the search data. Aaron Hernandez, for example, was the fifth most-searched athlete of the year. While it can be argued that his story is really a crime story, not a sports one, Hernandez’ case shone a light on the National Football League, and the New England Patriots. It also raised significant sports-related questions about the future performance of the team. In that light, we could differentiate between Hernandez and Oscar Pistorius, for example.

The biggest surprise in 2013 was how many of our top search terms were uniquely Canadian. BlackBerry was #2 overall. Canadians showed a lot of interest in everything from the Timothy Bosma disappearance to the Calgary floods, not to mention Lac Megantic and the sag of Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor Rob Ford. Helene Campbell captured the nation’s imagination, and even NSA leaker Edward Snowden managed to tie Canada into the ongoing debate over espionage and secrecy.

2013 had its share of silly scandals and celebrity sightings, but more than any year in recent memory, it was also a year of important news, and outstanding people, and one that, in the end, was proudly Canadian.