Facebook was the top search term for fourth straight year, accounting for 4.13% of all US searches

For the fourth year in a row, Facebook has been crowned the number one search term. More specifically, Facebook accounted for 4.13 percent of all searches in 2012, a 33 percent increase over 2011.

The latest data comes from Experian, which analyzed the 68 “most popular” search engines in the US. Here are the results:

As you can see, Facebook dominates both lists yet again. It was the top-visited website for the third year and accounted for 79.1 billion total US visits in 2012, beating out Google at 78.5 billion total US visits. Rounding out the top five were YouTube (25.9 billion), Yahoo! Mail (22.2 billion) and Yahoo! (20.8 billion).

For the most searched terms, little has changed, though “craigslist” managed to move ahead of “facebook login” to number four, and amazon bumped yahoo.com of the top 10 list. As for the most-visited Websites, mail.live.com dropped off the top 10 list in 2012, letting msn.com move up and ebay.com make it in (for the first time since 2009). The top 10 websites accounted for 276.3 billion total US visits (32 percent of all US Internet visits in 2012), which was slightly up compared to 2011.

Yet the real story here is that once again, Facebook is king and nobody looks ready to challenge it. In fact, the social network seems to be only growing more and more.

Four variations of the term “Facebook” were among the top 10 terms. Common search terms for Facebook accounted for 5.84 percent of all searches in the US among the top 50 terms, or a 27 percent increase compared with 2011.

Here are three other interesting tidbits from the study:

• The top 50 search terms accounted for more than 12 percent of all Internet searches in 2012 – representing a 30 increase compared to 2011.
• New terms that entered the top 50 search terms for 2012 included: backpage, cool math games, fox news, pinterest and pof – an acronym for Plenty of Fish, the top visited dating site in the US.
• The search terms yahoo and ebay have appeared among the top 10 since this ranking was started in 2006.

“Navigational searches continue to dominate the top search results as users continue to visit their favorite sites via search engines instead of directly entering a web address into their browsers URL bar,” Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Experian Marketing Services, said in a statement. “Single-word searches grew 16 percent in 2012 as a result of continued reliance on search engine’s suggested results. Other top 2012 searches reflected the ongoing infatuation with celebrities online.”

Image credit: Asif Akbar