Strangely, people also use search engines to find other search engines.
Experian Hitwise has released their annual list of the year's most searched terms on search engines and as expected, everyone likes Facebook. The social networking giant topped the list for the third-year running, followed by second-place YouTube which moved up from third place in 2010. Craig's List, eBay and strangely, Mapquest also made the top 10, but dominance of social media search terms is the real take-away. Social networking search terms were by the most commonly searched category, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 terms overall (an increase of 12 percent year over year). However, it is 'Facebook' itself that accounted for the lion's share of that percentage. 3.48 of the top 50 terms are variations on the name, like 'Facebook Login' and 'facebook.com'.
Curiously, two of the top ten search terms are for a search engine: 'Yahoo' and 'yahoo.com' clocked in at 6 and 10 respectively, proving that a lot of people seem to remember a time before Google, but not how to find it. Perhaps they ought to let someone google that for them. The top ten most-searched terms are:
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
Experian Hitwise also tracked the most-visited sites, and as with search-terms, Facebook topped the list. That ought to give another headache to number 2 Google, already wiping egg of its face after news that Facebook is the most popular Android app. While YouTube is in a healthy 3rd place, Gmail ranked 8 while Yahoo Mail came in at number 4. The top ten most visited sites are:
1) Facebook
2) Google
3) YouTube
4) Yahoo Mail
5) Yahoo.com
6) Bing
7) Yahoo search
8) Gmail
9) Mail.live.com
10) MSN
And because it is of the most pressing concern, the top public figure searched for online was Justin Beiber. While this may seem somewhat disturbing in the same year Osama Bin Ladin was killed, we can take consolation in news that he at least beat Charlie Sheen handily. The Tiger Blood crazyman came in at sixth place. The full press release, including data on music searches, movie titles and 'personality searches, is available on Experian's official site.
But yes, never quite understood the logic behind typing "www.facebook.com" into Google. Typing "facebook", yes, can get that on the first few visits, but seriously does nobody use bookmarks or favourities anymore?
they sometimes wright that wrong in the search bar, happens with everyone, maybe browsers should use only one box like IE9, 10, Opera, Chrome
well search engine guards against lazy typos at the cost of 2 clicks
I've seen people who wants to search something in the web and they open the browser and type in the address bar random words with no www or .com or anything, just plain text, for example "what's the fastest car in the world". These are people who don't even know how to make Google as a home page or how to type an address.
Every time i put hands on someone's computer, i see tons of useless programs starting with windows and tons of useless programs, plug ins, search bars ecc., installed on their system.
When i check their system, i always find hundreds of registry errors, bunch of gb of space waiting to be cleaned, 30 to 40% hdd fragmentation levels ecc.
Not to mention, that there's still a big % of users who doesn't have antivirus program installed or doesn't even know what this is.
Who the hell types "www.facebook.com" or "facebook login" in Google???? Please....
Old people gonna old.
you would be surprised to know that most people aren't web educated
I have att (bellsouth) as my ISP. If I type in bellsouth.net to check my mail (or leave it as my homepage, which the modem install changes it to), it redirects to
http://att.my.yahoo.com/
Same thing happens every time you update IE, since it MUST change your homepage to MSN
http://www.msn.com/?ocid=iehp
See for yourself why people just type it into the search bar. It's actually the same amount of work. You can type it in the searchbar, then click on the first link, or you can click on the address bar, and then type it in. Most people are lazy and don't care, as long as it works.
Wow. I guess there's a lot of people who can't distinguish their URL bar from their search bar. Or maybe browsers such as Chrome that has a single URL/search bar do a search for eveything entered, even URLs?
It's not that shocking when you consider the majority of the population has an IQ below 100.
Yo dawg we heard you like search engines...
so we searched for a search engine in your search engine.