• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 20, 2012

For the fourth year in a row, Facebook was the most search term in the U.S. in 2012, accounting for 4.13% of all searches, a 33% increase from last year, according to new data from Experian Marketing Services. The firm said four variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 5.62% of searches overall, a 27% increase from 2011.

YouTube was again the No. 2 search term, with craigslist moving up a notch to third place. Yahoo, eBay, MapQuest and Amazon.com and eBay also made the top 10. New terms entering the top 50 search terms for 2012 included backpage, cool math games, Fox News, Pinterest and POF – an acronym for Plenty of Fish, the top visited dating site in the US.

Besides leading in searches, Facebook was the most-visited site for the third year and accounted for 79.1 billion total US visits, followed by Google, with 78.5 billion.