The top ten U.S. search terms included four variations on Facebook – Facebook.com, Facebook, Facebook login and www.facebook.com – marking the second year the social networking giant has had four top ten slots, according to new research.
The study, from Hitwise, found that overall, searches for Facebook accounted for 4.42 per cent of searches – a 24 per cent increase from last year.
Other web giants such as YouTube made up the rest of the top ten, in a year dominated by ‘navigational’ searches. Most people prefer to search rather than type in an address, said a Hitwise spokesman.
Hitwise attributed much of the change is partly driven by ‘predictive search’, where Google or other search engines ‘fill in’ search terms as a user types.
New terms that entered the top 50 search terms for 2011 included amazon.com, hotmail, and twitter.
Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches.
‘Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar,’ said Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise. ‘It’s a result of predictive search functions across major search engines.’
Celebrities don’t even begin to enter the chart – compiled across all search engines – till 92nd place, where Justin Bieber scored the top slot.
Over the past 12 weeks, ‘Daily Mail’ is 14th from the top – and the Daily Mail charts far higher than all other British newspapers.
The results are hugely different from charts such as Google’s Zeitgeist, because Google structures their reports to cut out searches for websites.
THE TOP 10 – 2010
1. Facebook
2. Facebook login
3. YouTube
4. Craigslist
5. MySpace
6. Facebook.com
7. eBay
8. Yahoo
9. www.facebook.com
10. Mapquest
THE TOP TEN – 2011
1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. Facebook login
4. Craigslist
5. Facebook.com
6. Yahoo
7. eBay
8. www.facebook.com
9. Mapquest
10. Yahoo.com
TOP 5 PUBLIC FIGURES
1. Justin Bieber
2. Casey Anthony
3. Kim Kardashian
4. Nicki Minaj
5. Selena Gomez
TOP 5 CELEBRITIES
1. Kim Kardashian
2. Glenn Beck
3. Rush Limbaugh
4. Robert Pattinson
5. Khloe Kardashian
TOP 5 MOVIE SEARCHES
1. Star Wars
2. Transformers
3. (Twilight) Breaking Dawn
4. Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows
5. Fast Five
TOP 5 TV SHOWS
1. American Idol
2. Young and the Restless
3. Dora the Explorer
4. Dancing with the Stars
5. Days of our Lives