Facebook bigger than Jesus online in 2010

The first rule of Facebook is that you always talk about Facebook, at least that is according to stats released by Experian Hitwise that show that Mark Zuckerberg's social network was the most searched for term online in 2010. "This is the second year that the social networking website has been the top search term overall, …

[Mark Thomas 3]

I still don't understand...

...why people actually search for Facebook.

Are they /that/ stupid that they can't go to www.facebook.com? Obviously.

[Elmer Phud]

Stupid? no

When you are constantly bombarded with 'make me your homepage' boxes to untick (along with countless 'add this toolbar') many people end up with Google as thier homepage.

All they do is type in 'facebook' as that's what they've always done - sorted.

Usually all they need to type in is 'Fa'' and it's there in front of them

That they can't even right-click and 'add to favourites/menu/toolbar' is usually because no-one has ever shown them how to. You may be forgetting the survey of people who, when asked which broweser they used, most replied 'Google'.

It's very strange out there in the 'Real World'(tm), browsers still on default (loads still pointing to Microsoft), people not running Adblock, still paying for bloatware A/V. It's almost unrecognisable.

[MAPINGUARI]

erm....

people google facebook? is the url that tough to remember?

[jonathanb]

Re: erm....

I've seen people google "www.facebook.com" and similar. They don't appear to realise there is an address bar at the top of the screen that they can use.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many of those searches

come from people who don't know how to type www.facebook.com into the address bar or use favourites...

[ulther]

huh?

What is this Jesus you speak of?

[Evil Auditor]

Bing being 10th

Everytime I mistype an URL in IE I get 'binged'. Never really used it though. Are there other experiences?

[NogginTheNog]

Most searched - a reason?

I've observed my kids doing the following when they open a browser with a home page set to Google. Instead of changing the address to where they want to go to, they just type the term in to the search bar ("youtube", "facebook", "hotmail", etc) and then select the link from the results that takes them there. So I think for a lot of people Google isn't just a way to search for things you don't know how to find, but also to get to EVERYTHING online. It's replaced the address bar as the way to navigate to sites.

And so the monster grows... ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just for kids any more

The organisation where I work (anon, obviously) runs a large-ish web based service with poor Google rank.

But a separate website that links to aforementioned service has good SE rank. And the *majority* of the traffic to that website is click-through from search engines to the large-but-poorly-SEO'd system.

So. Thousands of users every month type the name of this service into Google, click on the first link that comes back, then click on the first link they see on that page. This is somehow easier than remembering a (short) URL or just bookmarking the damn thing.

Badgers, because I think maybe some Web users actually are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep Jesus out of the 'Xmas Atmos', he always spoils the fun!

FB bigger than Jesus and just as irritating!

[James Cooke]

Everyone searches

Doing remote IT support I have learned two things, firstly people really are that stupid and secondly everyone thinks that Google is the internet and will put urls in there even if you specifically tell them to put an address in the address bar.

[ennuikiller]

Zuckerberg fucked!

Zuckerberg is FUCKED now! When John Lennon claimed the same for the Beatles, they started burning Beatle albums and John needed to retract his statement .... do I sense an onslaught of righteous hackers striking out against FB??

[Richard Porter]

Have these people not heard of bookmarks?

I just use a local home page with all my frequently used links on it, plus a few mini-forms that log me in automatically to some sites, and search boxes for Google, ebay and streetmap.co.uk.

[Velv]

Facebook?

Makes you wonder why someone would pay $13m for sex.com if sex doesn't even feature in the top search terms (I bet it does, they just excluded certain terms form the stats).

[Joe Harrison]

To be fair...

I too hate misuse of Google as a substitute address bar but I have found myself doing it because....

1. Google have made it extremely tempting in Chrome by merging the address bar and search bar functions. You type <whatever> into the empty space and Chrome works out whether it is an URL or a search.

2. It's a time-saver when you don't really know the URL for occasional use. I can never remember whether it's sourceforge.org or sourceforge.net for example, or johnlewis.co.uk or johnlewis.com and I'm tired of mis-arriving at parked domains full of ads.

[xantastic]

I Googled johnlewis ...

... and was unimpressed by the results.

Is that like a crap WalMart?

And are electricals similar to electronics?

[Colin Brett]

Combinations of face + book

"Four variations of the term 'facebook' were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 3.48 per cent of searches overall."

What were they? These spring to mind: facebook, bookface, "face book" (with a space)

Or, getting silly now: "face palm" "f*ck face" "ass book".

[Elmer Phud]

fcebk, foceback, Faacbook, Faseboookk

well, there's four to be gettng on with.

(people may be computer literate but spelling is usually left to the spiullchucker)

[32holes]

padded google searches

This is just lazy people, like me, who just type in an URL without the pre or suffix as many of you have mentioned. I immediately knew why there were so many searches for facebook and it had nothing to do with %2 of the worlds population searching for it.

For once i do not mind Facebook................. actually ranking higher than DOG. But they are still evil scum though.

500 million sheep ready for the ke-bab-a-a-aaab

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the Jesus Christ in this article?

I declare you off topic in your own article....

[rvt]

What's facebook?

I still have not a single clue what I can do on facebook... Apparently it's a book full of faces I can look into, so what?!?!