Google is often the target of the net faithful's ire for its ever increasing size and so-called "evilness." That distinction may now belong to Facebook, as Hitwise said Thursday the site now leads all others -- including Google -- as being both the most visited and most searched for in the US.
Facebook accounted for 8.93 percent of all traffic for the period of January through November 2010, followed by Google with 7.13 percent. Rounding out the top five were Yahoo Mail with 3.52 percent, Yahoo with 3.3 percent, and YouTube with 2.65 percent.
If all Google's disparate web properties are added together, it still retains the top spot with 9.85 percent of all web traffic.
This was the first time Facebook beat Google in terms of web traffic, although it was the second year in a row that the site led in search terms. Social networking site MySpace saw the biggest fall: in 2009 it was the second most term, this year it has fallen to fifth.
"Facebook login" was the second most searched term, followed by YouTube, Craigslist, and then MySpace.
Two other variations of the term "Facebook" not mentioned previously were in the top ten searches this year, and accounted for 3.48 percent of searches overall, a 207 percent increase over last year.
Hitwise also noted that several new terms began climbing the list of most searched -- many of which involved streaming media and entertainment, including Netflix, Verizon Wireless, ESPN, Chase, pogo, tagged, Wells Fargo, yellow pages, poptropica, games and Hulu.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
