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As the days got shorter and the temperatures dropped, Yahoo! Search users turned their thoughts to jack ‘o lanterns, candy corn … and how to make an evening gown out of beef. What do all of these have in common? Halloween, of course.

If you don’t have your costume idea yet, take a look at the most popular costume queries on Yahoo! Search:

1. Disney characters, including all of the princesses and Toy Story characters
2. Lady Gaga (plus the incredible meat dress and the bubble dress)
3. Pirate
4. Alice in Wonderland
5. Masquerade

Though many costume searches were for fictional characters, other users wanted to look just like some real-life characters. Searches for Chilean miner costume spiked by 7,100% in the third week of October.  And fans of the Jersey Shore were loading up on hair gel and spray tan to pay tribute to their idols, with Snooki the clear favorite. Yahoo! users searched for information about her signature pouf three times more than they asked about how to look like any other cast member. DIYers checked with Yahoo! to learn how to make costumes at home: popular choices were scarecrows and hobos.

But why stop at dressing yourself, when you could also dress up your four-legged friends?  The top-searched canine costumes on Yahoo! this year:

1.       Batman dog
2.       Ewok dog
3.       Slinky Dog
4.       Yoda dog
5.       Taco dog

(Perhaps this means that come November 1^st, we’ll see a spike in queries like why is my dog ignoring me?)

The Halloween–themed searches continued when users hit the road with their mobile devices. Popular search terms on mobile included couples costumes and plus-size costumes. Once they had their outfits on, mobile users wanted to know where they could find haunted houses and pumpkin patches.

But what’s trick or treat without sweets? It seemed like everyone wanted to be the most popular house on the block: we saw a spike in searches from shoppers for “what is the most popular candy bar?” and domestic gods and goddesses who wanted to create the goodies themselves looked for “Halloween cupcakes.” from. One thing’s for sure, no one wanted to hand out the bad stuff –searches for the top 10 worst halloween candy went up by 17,800% last week.

Other seasonal searches ranged from the practical: how long before halloween should I carve a pumpkin, to the fantastical: what do they teach at schools for witches?

Yahoo!’s Heather Cabot to talked about these searches and more on ABC news. Watch it here.

Mireille Majoor
Yahoo! Search Blog