It was truly the year of the social network, as Facebook topped the list of most-searched terms on the Internet for the second year in a row, according to Experian Hitwise, a part of Experian Marketing Services. The company, which analyzed the top 1000 search terms for 2010, said the word “facebook” accounted for 2.11 percent of all searches. Four variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 3.48 percent of searches overall.
The term “facebook login” moved up from the ninth spot in 2009 to the second spot in 2010. YouTube was the third most-searched term in 2010, followed by craigslist, myspace and facebook.com, according to the company’s research. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches.
When combined, common search terms such as facebook and facebook.com, for Facebook accounted for 3.48 percent of all searches in the US among the top 50 terms, which represents a 207 percent increase versus 2009. YouTube terms accounted for 1.12 percent, representing a 106 percent increase versus 2009, according to the company’s research. AOL search terms accounted for 0.34 percent of searches in 2010, but grew 22 percent versus 2009. Google terms accounted for 0.63 percent, and Craigslist terms accounted for 0.62 percent.
The company found new terms that entered into the top 50 search terms for 2010 included searches for the online move rental company Netflix, Verizon Wireless, ESPN, Chase, pogo, tagged, Wells Fargo, yellow pages, poptropica, games and Hulu, the online video streaming site. Research showed Facebook was the top-visited Web site for the first time and accounted for 8.93 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010. Google.com ranked second with 7.19 percent of visits, followed by Yahoo Mail (3.52 percent), Yahoo (3.30 percent) and YouTube (2.65 percent).
For more, read the eWeek article: Facebook is Most-Searched Term in 2010: Report.
