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.
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, …
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Friday 31st December 2010 14:40 GMT 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.
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Thursday 30th December 2010 11:45 GMT 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... ;-)
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Thursday 30th December 2010 14:44 GMT 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.
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Thursday 30th December 2010 15:54 GMT 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.
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Friday 31st December 2010 14:31 GMT 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
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