By: RH
Experian released their study of the Top 1,000 search terms and Facebook topped the list again. This was the fourth straight year that Facebook was the top search term.
Experian Marketing Services
analyzed the top 1,000 search terms from Hitwise data for 2012 , and
Facebook was the top-searched term overall in the US. This is the fourth
year that the social networking Website has been the top search term
overall, accounting for 4.13 percent of all searches, a 33 percent
increase from 2011. Four variations of the term “facebook” were among
the top 10 terms and accounted for 5.62 percent of US searches overall, a
27 percent increase from 2011.
Among the top 10 terms, the top two terms stayed the same with
facebook the top search term and “youtube” ranked at number two. The
search term “craigslist” moved up from the fourth spot in 2011 to the
third spot in 2012. “Facebook login” was the fourth most-searched term
in 2012, followed by “facebook.com” and “yahoo.” The search term
“amazon” moved into the top 10 terms for the first time. Analysis of the
search terms revealed that social networking–related terms dominated
the results, accounting for 6.03 percent of the top 50 searches. This is
an increase of 44 percent compared with 2011.
Of particular interest to domainers was the fact that Experian found that people continued to use the search engines to go to their favorite sites. Its very interesting that someone searches for Facebook on Google and then clicks the search result to log in to Facebook.
“Navigational searches continue to dominate the top search results as
users continue to visit their favorite sites via search engines instead
of directly entering a web address into their browsers URL bar,” said
Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Experian Marketing
Services. “Single-word searches grew 16 percent in 2012 as a result of
continued reliance on search engine’s suggested results. Other top 2012
searches reflected the ongoing infatuation with celebrities online.”
Oh the irony, that ‘yahoo’ is the sixth most searched for term on Google.