Welcome to the Thursday, December 27 edition of "The Beat," Billboard.com's daily music news show, featuring host Jonathan Brooks running down the latest music news -- who's making headlines and who's topping the charts.

As the end of the year looms, in today's episode J.B. and the Beat take time to rewind t o review Google's top trending searches of 2012 [1]. This year, as you'll see in the Beat episode below, some of the key top trending searches were music related. Whitney Houston, who passed away in February, is No. 1 on this Google list. PSY, the Korean rapper/performer who had the whole planet galloping to "Gangnam Style," follows at No. 2 on the Google tally.

Be sure to come back to Billboard.com [2] each weekday to watch a fresh episode of "The Beat."