subject: Facebook visited more times than Google in 2010! [print this page] Facebook visited more times than Google in 2010!
According to a new report released by Experion Hitwise, a leading online intelligence company, Facebook has displaced Google in overall page visits for 2010 and retained the first position in most searched terms for the second year running.
The search term "facebook" and it variants appear four times in the top ten most-searched terms amongst Internet users in the United States. Combined, Facebook related search terms accounted for 3.48% of searches. Up from ninth place in 2009, "facebook login" took second place this year.
Two of the four Facebook search terms in the top ten were the actual URL itself, "facebook.com" and "www.facebook.com" taking the sixth and ninth spots respectively. This statistic is interesting because it shows the average Internet users low level of technical prowess.
The report did not provide any insight as to why people search for a URL rather than typing it into the address bar a few pixels up the screen. Most modern browsers even contain a local search engine of sorts that uses keywords such as page titles or a portion of the URL to narrow down the desired page using the browser history to further simplify the process of web navigation.
Knee-jerk reactions to this report have led to proclamations of the beginning of Google's death spiral. However, the two companies have quite different business models. Taking the history of previous social networking sites into account Facebook popularity will wane the instant something else better comes along. It is guaranteed that many aspiring web developers and entrepreneurs are currently trying to create the next big thing.
Speaking of moribund social networking sites, Myspace surprisingly managed to grab seventh position in site visits down from fifth last year.
Google has a sustainable business model, unless Internet users stop searching for things or Facebook releases it's own superior search engine Google will be in business for quite a long time. As evidenced by the Experian Hitwise report users are not likely to stop using search engines to search for URLs anytime soon.
While interesting, the Hitwise top search term statistics are useless for any purpose other than a popularity contest.
A more telling statistic was the top visited websites top ten list. Facebook knocked Google out of first position and accounted for 8.93% of total United States site visits between January and November 2010. Google.com racked up 7.19% of visits and Yahoo! Mail amassed 3.52%. The top five most-visited sites were rounded out by Yahoo and YouTube with 3.3% and 2.65% respectively.
It should be noted that Google maintained nearly a full percentage point advantage (9.85% vs. 8.93%) in the site visit department over Facebook when all company properties are considered. This statistic is significant as the Google realm is fragmented into many different sub-domains such as mail.gooogle.com, maps.google.com etc, etc.
The top ten most-visited websites garnered 33 percent of United States web traffic during the period between January and November 2010. Five of the top ten most-visited sites list are search engines. This number is of interest to a website builder because it shows the importance of search engine optimization due to the high usage thereof.
While the numbers put up by Facebook are impressive by any standard, they likely are not the start of any meaningful trend or the dethroning of Google as many are proclaiming. Surely, one could find similar reports from a few years back that state similar claims about Myspace taking over the world. Everyone knows how that worked out.
