We take a look at the top search queries from Google for the year 2009 in the World and India. Google Zeitgeist 2009 has published the list of most popular and fastest rising search queries of the year globally, for India and many other countries.

Rediff has scrapped their earlier blogging platform Rediff iLand, which they had created in-house and launched a new portal called Rediff Blogs, which runs on WordPress MU. Rediff Blogs is available in 9 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam and Kannada.

McDonald’s will soon start offering free Wi-Fi for customers in collaboration with AT&T starting mid-January. Currently, McDonald charges customers $2.95 to access Wi-Fi for two hours. Free Wi-Fi in McDonald’s will be launched in 11000 locations across US.

Yesterday we had told you how Microsoft was caught with their pants down, when Plurk accused them of outright design and code theft. Though Microsoft did not react much initially, they have now released a press statement which apologizes to Plurk for the design theft.

Microsoft was fined $16000 by a Delhi court for a case they filed against prejudice software pirates. Piracy is the biggest problem for software companies in Asian countries, and this ruling will definitely put a dent in their hopes.

Google has announced a new URL shortening service called Goo.gl and Facebook have their secret URL shortening service fb.me under testing.

Microsoft China has been accused of lifting design and code from their social networking rival Plurk. Much of the design of MSN Club China is very similar to that of Plurk along with more similarities in the code used by Microsoft.

Most popular torrent sites for 2009. The Pirate Bay (TPB) was #1 torrent site of the year, with an estimated daily visitors of approx 4.5 million users and page views amounting to more than 26 million per day.

MySQL founder Michael Widenius pleads users to act against the Sun Microsystems and Oracle deal by writing to the European Commission. The Oracle and Sun still hangs in balance due to European Comission intervension in the deal.

iPhone OS 3.1.3 and iPhone OS 4.0 have been spotted in the wild. However, the new OS might be totally fake as browser user strings are easy to manipulate. However, iPhone OS 3.1.3 or OS 4.0 may come out in near future, but this is definitely fake.

Opera completes a huge milestone of 90 million users. Opera fans have gathered in Oslo, the hometown of Opera founder to celebrate this feat. Opera is also called the “Porn Browser” by many people.

Microsoft is pulling out copies of Windows 7 Family Pack from retail stores. Microsoft claims that Windows 7 Family Pack Home Premium, which retailed for $149 and provided 3 user-licenses, would have been available for a limited period until stocks lasted.

Just after a major design update last month, Facebook is planning to launch a new design shortly. The new Facebook design changes the news feed, notifcations, photo albums and uploader. Checkout the screenshots of the new Facebook design.

UK ISP Virgin Media has begun testing a new technology to track “illegal P2P filesharing” on its network. This would allow them to track illegal downloads on their network and track users who do it.

Within one month of its launch, Windows 7 is already ahead of Mac OS X in term of its market share. The new operating system from Microsoft has started tasting early success.