14 DAY TRIAL // Google, Yahoo and Bing have revealed this year's top searches, as seen from their perspective. Google shows that "Google+" is the second fastest growing search term on the site. Yahoo revealed that the "iPhone" was the "top search term."
Bing doesn't have an overall top, but the most searched for person was Justin Bieber. These yearly search roundups are interesting and somewhat insightful. They're also completely disingenuous.
You see, the top search of the year wasn't Rebecca Black, as Google would tell your, nor was it the iPhone like Yahoo claims. It was Facebook. And the second biggest search term was YouTube. The third was "Facebook login."
Experian Hitwise has revealed its own, independent search data which paints a very different picture. But not one that's unexpected. Because Facebook was the top search term in 2010 and in 2009.
The top 10 most searched terms of the year may be quite surprising to someone that is not used to this type of data.
Facebook is not only the top term, it comes in at number three, with "facebook login," at number five, with "facebook.com," and at number eight with "www.facebook.com."
Yes, people search for "www.facebook.com." The entire top 10 is made up of queries made by people not really wanting to do a search, but rather wanting to get to a site, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo etc.
And the only way they know of to get to a site is by typing its name in the search box. There may not be a huge number of people that do this, but the ones that do, do it very often.
In fact, Facebook-related searches made up 3.48 percent of all searches from the top 50 in the US. And that's up 33 percent from the previous year. YouTube also shot up 21 percent to represent 1.36 percent of all top 50 searches.
Of course, putting out a list that shows Facebook as the most searched for thing online year after year isn't terribly exciting, so you can't really fault search engines for choosing things like "fastest growing" to focus on.