“Facebook” was the most-searched term in the U.S. online for the third year in a row, according to new data from Experian Hitwise. The social network accounted for 3.1% of all searches in 2011, a 46% increase from last year. Four variations of “Facebook” were also among the top10 along with others including “YouTube” and “Craigslist.”
Facebook was also the top-visited site for the second year, accounting for 10.3% of all U.S. visits between January and November 2011--a 15% increase from 2010. Google.com ranked second, with 7.7% of visits — a 7% increase— followed by YouTube (3.2%), Yahoo! Mail (3%) and Yahoo! (2.5%).
New terms entering the top 50 search terms included addicting games, amazon.com, cnn, chase online, face, hotmail, lowes, pandora, twitter and you.
“Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar,” said Simon Bradstock, general manager of Hitwise, in a statement. He noted that single-word searches increased 11% this year. “Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search optimization campaigns because of this behavior, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines,” said Bradstock.