14 DAY TRIAL // Google unveiled its 2010 Zeitgeist, Yahoo had its own showcase of the biggest trends in search for the year, but those focused more on fastest rising terms and new trends, not on the raw queries. But looking at the top actual searches, in terms of volume, can be quite interesting too, which is what Hitwise did.
Unsurprising perhaps, the top search term of the year was Facebook. But "facebook" wasn't only the biggest term, Facebook-related searches dominated the top 10.
"This is the second year that the social networking website has been the top search term overall, accounting for 2.11 percent of all searches. Four variations of the term 'facebook' were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 3.48 percent of searches overall," Experian Hitwise wrote.
"The term 'facebook login' moved up from the 9th spot in 2009 to the second spot in 2010. YouTube was the third most-searched term in 2010, followed by craigslist, myspace and facebook.com. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches," it added.
As always, the things people search for seem very odd. And not odd in the sense of 'disturbing,' that you might expect, but odd in the sense that the ninth most popular search query of the year was "www.facebook.com".
Facebook.com was the sixth most popular. This is hardly new, if you look at last year's results the sixth most popular query was "google." Earlier reports, that focused on Google alone, also found that "google" was one of the top searches.
Still, it's pretty hard to understand why someone who goes through the trouble of writing the full URL would not type it in the address bar in the first place.
One thing's for sure though, Facebook is the biggest thing online as far as most people are concerned and it may very well come to be the only thing online for many.