2011's Fastest-Rising Searches Worldwide

In another illustration of Facebook‘s top-of-mind status among web surfers, “Facebook” was the most-searched term of 2011, according to Experian Hitwise.
This was the third year in a row that Facebook topped the list. The company’s name accounted for 3.1% of all searches in 2011, a 46% jump over last year, the researcher reports. However, if you take into account four variations of Facebook — Facebook, Facebook.com, Facebook Login and www.facebook.com — the social networking giant’s share of the top 50 searches was 3.48%, an increase of 33%. The four terms also appeared in the top 10:
  • 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
YouTube, meanwhile, accounted for 1.36% of searches, a 21% increase over last year. Searches for Yahoo were also up 15%.
In a statement from Hitwise, Simon Bradstock, general manager of the researcher, noted that single-word searches rose 11% as consumers got used to predictive search technologies like Google Autocomplete. Bradstock noted that searches for “face” and “you” cracked the top 50 as web surfers let Google and other search engines finish the terms “Facebook” and “YouTube.”
Looking at the most-visited websites, Hitwise gave Facebook more reason to celebrate as Facebook accounted for 10.29% of all website visits, a 15% increase from 2010. Google’s network of websites, excluding YouTube, drew 7.7% of all web visits, a 7% increase. However, if you include YouTube in Google’s ranking, Google bests Facebook with 11.98% of all visits, a 22% jump over last year.
  • 1. www.facebook.com
  • 2. www.google.com
  • 3. www.youtube.com
  • 4. mail.yahoo.com/li>
  • 5. www.yahoo.com
  • 6. www.bing.com
  • 7. search.yahoo.com
  • 8. www.gmail.com
  • 9. mail.live.com
  • 10. www.msn.com
Finally, Hitwise found the public figures searched most often in 2011 included, in order: Justin Bieber, Casey Anthony, Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, Selena Gomez and Charlie Sheen.
Hitwise’s report on top search terms is at odds with a list from Yahoo, which reported that the most popular search term this year was “iPhone.”

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