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People still use search to find the most popular websites

People still use search to find the most popular websites

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Experian Hitwise top search term results indicate that people still use search to navigate to the most popular sites on the web.

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Experian Hitwise has released its yearly search term statistics and once again, Facebook and YouTube top the list. The remainder of the top 10 includes three more Facebook-related terms, a couple of Yahoo! variants, craigslist, eBay, and MapQuest. Of course it's highly unlikely that all the millions of people putting those terms in the top 10 are actually looking for information or the latest news about them; they just want a quick way to the site without having to clumsily type dots and slashes. Indeed, if you look at the most visited websites of the year, Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Yahoo dominate the top spots. You've probably done it yourself hundreds of times: rather than typing in the URL, you just tap out a keyword, hit enter, and click the link you know from experience is going to pop up first. We still navigate the web through search.

Hitwise results are a little different from Google's Zeitgeist if you ignore the top terms and break things into categories: Justin Bieber tops public figures, Star Wars is somehow the number one movie search, and Lady Gaga edges out Bieber in music. You can see the full details at the source.

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