While The Global Language Monitor announced that Twitter is the Top Word of 2009 in its annual global survey of the English language (see earlier post), Experian® Hitwise® has analyzed the top 300 search terms for 2009 and Facebook was the top-searched term overall. This is the first year that the social networking Website has been the top search term overall, accounting for 0.67 percent of all searches. In fact, four variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 25 terms.

Facebook moved up from the 10th spot in 2008 to the top spot in 2009. MySpace was the second most-searched term in 2009, followed by Craigslist, YouTube and Yahoo Mail. Analysis of the search terms reveals that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 2.48 percent of the top 300 searches.
Adding up common search terms – e.g., facebook and facebook.com – Facebook terms accounted for 1.09 percent of all searches. MySpace terms accounted for 1.02 percent, Yahoo terms accounted for 0.95 percent, Google terms accounted for 0.63 percent, and Craigslist terms accounted for 0.62 percent.


