By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In an astonishing statistic released this morning, Web analytics service Experian Hitwise reported that of all the Web searches performed in the United States on the top three search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing during the first four weeks of March, about two percent on average are for the word facebook. For Yahoo and Bing, Another one percent is for facebook.com, and just less than one percent is for facebook login.
Coupled with statistics for the same month from analytics service comScore, Experian's findings suggest that, from March 1 through March 27, searches for a way to get to Facebook other than through typing the address or clicking on a bookmark, accounted for as many as 175.84 million Google searches in the US, over 78.9 million Yahoo searches, and over 80 million Bing searches.
That means an estimated 2.2% of Americans' Web searches are for their Facebook front page.
Before one goes chocking this figure up completely to massive user inexperience: Although typing facebook into the address bar of Firefox brings up the home page of Facebook.com, typing facebook into the address bar of Internet Explorer and Google Chrome brings up results for a Web search for Facebook using the browser's default search engine, which for many users is typically Google.
On the other hand, it's difficult to ignore that -- once again coupling Experian's and comScore's numbers -- some 18.5 million Yahoo searches, and nearly 20.2 million Bing searches, in the US for the first four weeks of March, were for google.
The fact that tens of millions of searches every month are for the location of one of the most obvious Web portals on the planet, posed a problem for a very legitimate news site, ReadWriteWeb, last February. A news article whose headline was "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login," ostensibly about the social service incorporating friends lists from multiple other services, became one of the leading search results on Google and other sites, for users typing facebook login.
The result was pandemonium, as thousands of folks confused about their new destination, commented to ReadWriteWeb wondering where their Facebook had gone...and worse, lamenting the fate of all their farm animals and crops they had tended to in the game of Farmville, a Facebook app that demands persistent participation.
But what's even more astonishing is that the parade of confused participants continues even as late as today (April 28), some eleven weeks after the article's original date of publication. Commenters (some for real...some perhaps pretending) continue to protest against what they believe to be a change in Facebook's format, including redecorating from blue to red, still pleading, "How do I log in?" Protesters join a sea of equally sad lampooners ridiculing the confused patrons along with, more recently, unsolicited advertisements from attention seekers.
Learning the lesson from this experience and leveraging their own gains from it, a number of sites have renamed or retitled themselves "Facebook Login," or something similar. Despite even that fact, the ReadWriteWeb article continues to be the #6 search result that Google provides, for the estimated 85.4 million US users who type facebook login every month.
That figure is astonishingly close to the number of people that Farmville reports as active users, as Web analyst and blogger Justin Kistner reported last month. Also putting two and two together, Kistner noted that the number of people Facebook reports to be playing Farmville in March (83.2 million) exceeds the number of people believed by independent estimates to be using Twitter (75 million).
Thus, if you couple these figures, the number of people who can't find Facebook outnumber those who can find Twitter.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
