by
Rob Waugh
Daily Mail

The top ten
U.S. search terms included four variations on Facebook – Facebook.com,
Facebook, Facebook login and www.facebook.com
– the second year the social networking giant has had four
top ten slots.

Overall, searches
for Facebook accounted for 4.42 per cent of searches – a 24 per
cent increase in a year, according to web-monitoring firm Experian
Hitwise.

Other web giants
such as YouTube made up the rest of the top ten. Most people prefer
to search rather than type in an address, said Hitwise.

In the UK,
‘Daily Mail’ is 14th from the top in search terms – and the
Daily Mail charts far higher than all other British newspapers.

The habit of
typing in favourite websites, rather than entering them in the address
bar, is partly driven by ‘predictive search’, where Google or other
search engines ‘fill in’ search terms as you type. It’s just easier
to search rather than type in a web address that might not work.

Most of us
simply can’t be bothered to move the cursor up the screen to type
in a fiddly address when Google or other search engines will fill
it in for us.

It’s also much
easier on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, where typing
and navigating can be difficult.

In the UK in
particular, people are keen on brevity – unlike the US, the abbreviation
‘FB’ – no prizes for guessing what it’s short for’ – made the top
ten for the first time this year.

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the rest of the article

December
27, 2011

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© 2011 Daily
Mail