Facebook Has Taken Over The Web in 2010

Well, the year is over, and the numbers are all tallied, and it seems that 2010 was the year that Facebook became the king of the web. According to a report from Experian Hitwise, Facebook was not only the most searched item of the year but it even passed Google as the nation's most-visited website.

 

This was actually the second year that Facebook was the top searched for term among U.S users. The report said that the term “Facebook” received 2.11% of all searches, while some variations on the word like “Facebook.com” or “Facebook login” also received a lot of hits. The combined total ended up being 3.48% of all searches, which is a 207% increase from the site's position last year.

 

Some of the other popular terms were “YouTube”, “Craigslist”, “Myspace”, “Ebay” and “Yahoo”. What's even more interesting to note, is that Facebook was ranked the number one site on the list of most-visited websites. Facebook was were people were going 8.93% of the time. This figure bumped Google who only received 7.19% of web visits. The third place prize went to Yahoo mail, with 3.52% of the traffic.

 

As a Google fan girl, I have to mention that the visit rate for all of Google products combined was still higher than Facebook's, coming in with 9.85% of the traffic. The argument could be made that many Google users, myself included, don't actually visit the Google homepage. I tend to use the Google toolbar, or type my search directly into Chrome's address bar. Additionally, with more people using Firefox with its “way awesome bar” it is easier to find your favorite sites without having to search for them. I think that this might have skewed the results just a tiny bit.

 

But, in any case, many people in the Tech world are claiming that 2011 is going to be the year that Facebook topples Google completely. And it looks as though there is a lot of data to back that up. Facebook's traffic from the U.S has grown 55% this year and doesn't look as though it is slowing down.

 

 

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

 

 

 

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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.