Facebook: The Most Searched for Term on the Web?

As far as I can tell, Facebook is the most searched for term on the web.

Several weeks ago over dinner, my friend Peter and I were discussing the growth of Twitter and Facebook. One point we kept returning to was exactly how uncontested Facebook’s dominance is among social networks. While Twitter gets incredible media attention (resulting in the two companies often being talked about alongside each other), the frequent comparisons/references to Facebook and Twitter as ‘equals’ is misleading.

Peter and I ran a few search experiments using Google Insights, an amazing but relatively little-known tool that returns total numbers for search queries in Google over time.

Here is the 12 month chart for Twitter queries. The hockey stick like growth is more than impressive:

However, when compared to Facebook’s growth over the same period you can see Twitter is barely a blip on the radar. What’s interesting to note here is that a) the volume of queries for Facebook crushes those for Twitter, but also that b) Facebook continues to grow like a weed:

Although we had expected this outcome, the relative size difference was still amazing. Facebook has such a dominant presence that we began to wonder how it compared to other keywords we’d expect to also have massive queries. Again, what we found was shocking. We ran comparative searches against all of the following terms:

• Bible
• Sex
• Porn
• News

Amazingly not only did none of these beat Facebook, none even comes close:

It would thus appear that Facebook is now the most searched for term on the internet — a staggering feat for a company that has only existed for 5 years. Despite the opinions of detractors who question Facebook’s sustainability or business model, all I can say is that I’m a believer.

–As a side note, another interesting metric to track is the conversation about Twitter and Facebook on Stocktwits using the new ticker symbols proposed by Howard: $twit & $fbook

Tagged as: facebook, Google Insights, social network, stocktwits, twitter