Experian Hitwise has just recently analyzed the top one thousand search terms in the US for the year gone by, to come up with some interesting findings. According to its report, the world’s most popular social network (Facebook, which else?) has emerged as the top search term for one more year. Let us take a quick look at the US search scenario for 2011: 

• Facebook, as mentioned above, was the most searched term, taking up more than 3 percent of overall searches in the US, a good 46 percent rise from the previous year. Four variations of the term featured in the top 10 terms list, accounting for over 4 percent of searches overall, around 24 percent rise from 2010.
• YouTube jumped to the 2nd spot from the 3rd spot in 2010. YouTube terms logged 1.36 percent of total searches, representing more than 20 percent rise compared with 2010, whereas other Google terms (comprising YouTube) accounted for over percent and a half – an increase of around 27 percent.
• |‘Facebook login’ emerged as the third most widely searched item, followed by terms ‘craigslist’ and again ‘facebook.com’ that moved up a spot to figure among the top five searched items. The combined percentage of facebook and facebook.com was 3.48 percent among the top 50, a 33 rise.
• Further analysis revealed that terms related to social networking dominated the results, taking up more than 4 percent of the top 50 search terms, an increase of decent 12 percent in comparison to  2010.
• Yahoo terms accounted for 0.59 percent – an increase of 15 percent compared with 2010. Other terms in the top 10 list were ebay and mapquest. Some of the new terms entering the top 50 search terms’ list were addicting games, cnn, chase online, amazon.com, face, facebook sign up, lowes, pandora, twitter and hotmail.
• Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber were the two most most popular public figures in terms of top personality searches.

Analyzing the results, general manager of the research agency, Simon Bradstock, stated:

“Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar. Hitwise saw 11 percent growth of single-word searches in 2011 as terms like ‘face’ and ‘you’ made the top 50 searches. Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search optimization campaigns because of this behavior, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines.”

Other top searches for 2011 reflect fascination with celebrities online, whereas many of the leading fast-moving search terms revolved around notable personalities passing away or natural disasters.