Apart from Facebook, YouTube kept the chase hot and came on top once again. A further evidence that the worlds of search and social are colliding, is that the other top searched terms in 2011 has three more facebook related term, two yahoo term, craigslist, eBay, and MapQuest follows the lead.
It is astonishing why people had search those terms when everyone knows their website. Well of course they were looking for the latest news and views of those popular websites. The data comes from competitive intelligence service Experian Hitwise, which analyzed the top 1,000 search terms for 2011.
Looking at the top 10 terms, there were four types of Facebook searches: Facebook was number one, but the other three terms related to social media humongous on Google’s search engine were “facebook login” at No. 3, “facebook.com” at No. 5 and “www.facebook.com” at No. 8. Together, they constituted 4.42 percent of searches overall, a 24 percent increase from last year.
“Navigational searches prevailed the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar,” Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise, said in a statement.
“Hitwise saw 11 percent growth of single-word searches in 2011 as terms like ‘face’ and ‘you’ made the top 50 searches,” he noted. “Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when handling their search optimization campaigns because of this behavior, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines.”
This is the third consecutive year in a row that Facebook has been the top search term overall, accounting for 3.10 percent of all U.S. searches, but the social media leader shows no signs of slowing down; this year’s stats are a 46 percent increase from last year.
The list illustrates the popularity of the social media giant, but a number of other websites rounded out the top 10, including YouTube (No. 2), Craigslist (No. 4), Yahoo (No. 6), eBay (No. 7) and Mapquest (No. 9).
As you can see in the chart above, Facebook was also the most-visited Web site, followed by Google, YouTube, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, Bing, Yahoo Search, Gmail, Microsoft’s Live.com, and MSN.com.
“Other top 2011 searches reflect ongoing fascination with celebrities online, and many of the top fast-moving searches centered on natural disasters or notable personalities passing away,” Hitwise found.
Like many other top 10 searches this year, Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian were atop the celeb-related searches. Another fact is that it is pretty effortless to enter the word facebook on the search engine rather than writing all those slashes and dots in the website.
Besides, Facebooks’ rapid rise has continued in recent years, as the website becomes important not only to consumers but also to brands tempted with social media marketing campaigns. Most recent figures peg Facebook’s active users at more than 800 million.