According to new data out from Hitwise, Facebook now ranks as the most popular search term this year, beating out MySpace which ranked as the number one term last year. These search terms are of course unfiltered and top search terms tend to be for mostly navigational purposes. That’s why “youtube”, “craigslist”, and “yahoo” also rank among the top search terms of the year. Facebook has jumped from the number 10 position, which may be a good explanation for why Facebook was a top term on this year’s Google Zeitgeist.
In their post, Hitwise writes about the percentage of searches that each keyword accounted for:
Facebook terms accounted for 1.09 percent of all searches. MySpace terms accounted for 1.02 percent, Yahoo terms accounted for 0.95 percent, Google terms accounted for 0.63 percent, and Craigslist terms accounted for 0.62 percent.
Also included in the data was information about the most trafficked websites for the year. This year Facebook came in third behind Google.com followed by mail.yahoo.com. That a jump from the 9th spot last year. At this rate, we may end next year with Facebook attracting as much traffic as Google! The overall story here is that Facebook has had a massive year in terms of growth and is now one of the largest global internet brands.
Great info thanks Nick
Comment by Brian austin — December 15, 2009 @ 2:03 pm
and twitter is nowhere to be seen, which is unusual given all the hype surrounding it..
Comment by mike ashworth — December 15, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
None of those are searches, that's just people being too lazy to type "facebook.com" in their address bar.
Comment by John H — December 15, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
Its not laziness that cause people to type the url of a website into a search engine to get to it, its lack of basic web surfing knowledge. I saw it at my work yesterday. Nobody's given basic computer skills techniques, so they learn the wrong way.
Comment by kellin — December 16, 2009 @ 7:36 am
I'm on Facebook because it's NOT Twitter. With their redesign, and most recently, their privacy updates, it's clear they are trying to be more Twitter-like. If I wanted to be on Twitter, I'd go to Twitter. I don't want Facebook to be Twitter. The more Twitter-like they become, the more public they make my information, the more likely it is I will just shut down my account. I have already removed a bunch of stuff from it and set all my privacy options with custom settings.
Comment by Allen Fuller — December 16, 2009 @ 8:12 am