Hitwise.com which is owned by Experian, has released its Top 10 most searched / visited sites and has posted Facebook beating out Google for the #1 spot. 2010 Hitwise list
I always find it interesting to look at these stats and domainers are often more understanding to the reason behind many of the search terms.
Hitwise Top 10 Most Searched Terms
- facebook login
- youtube
- craigslist
- myspace
- facebook.com
- ebay
- yahoo
- www.facebook.com
- mapquest
A couple things that I want to point out for the top 10 searched terms.
Why isn’t Google in the list? It’s hard to "search" for Google, when you are on it! This means that people fully understand direct navigation TO Google IMO and the reason it’s not in the top 10. The #2 search is a little interesting to me, but I think the reason it is at number 2, is because of Facebook downtime. For what ever reason, when Facebook is down…. people think "Google" can bring it back up with a quick search to "login". I think #9 is the mainly the same reason, with the full www.facebook.com search.
It still amazes me that people "search for what they already know" with #6, facebook.com . #6 likely has some of its volume from downtime searches, but it doesn’t come from all downtime searches. People just feel the need to use a search engine to "look" for something they already know what they are looking for and depend on a search engine to give them a link to click, instead of simply using direct navigation and type facebook.com into the browser URL bar.
Hitwise Top 10 Most Visited Sites
- www.facebook.com
- www.google.com
- mail.yahoo.com
- www.yahoo.com
- www.youtube.com
- www.msn.com
- www.myspace.com
- mail.live.com
- search.yahoo.com
- www.bing.com
Not all that surprising to see 4 search engines in the top 10 and really 7 search engine affiliations. Facebook, Youtube and MySpace are the 3 that are not. Facebook and MySpace are both social network sites and YouTube the lone video site in the top 10. I was a little surprised to see MySpace in the top 10, as I thought Twitter would be.
3 sub-domains are interesting to see in the list of top 10 most visited sites IMO, but these mainly come from forwards.
One thing to keep in mind is Hitwise is only one source of tracking. If you were to visit other sites like Alexa.com, Compete.com and many more… you likely would see different results.
J
Google owns YouTube, so it’s somewhat affiliated as well.