The staggering usage growth of Facebook continues unabated as the company achieves yet another milestone – 100 million U.S. unique visitor in November. Accoridng to comScore, this is the first time the social networking site has exceeded that monthly mark.
Just recently, Aol celebrated its re-emergence as an independently-traded company. It was the fourth largest Website in the U.S. until last month. Comscore data for November, 2009 shows that Facebook went past Aol with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., against Aol’s 99.7 million. The other leaders are Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google with 130, 160 and 168 million U.S. visitors respectively.
On a global basis, Facebook already passed Aol back in Febuary 2009 to become the fouth largest site worldwide. With the current pace of Facebook, it might not take long to catch up Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.
How long do you guys think Facebook will take to become the largest Website in U.S.?
[Source: Washington Post]
The race to the top and and the final list of most searched terms of 2009 didn’t came as a shock, but was more of a thriller. Michael Jackson’s untimely death in June has topped year-end search lists from both Google and Yahoo.
The search companies released their annual lists on Tuesday as an effort to provide a cultural snapshot of what held the public’s interest over the past year. Jackson topped both Google’s fastest-rising and Yahoo’s overall searches.
“As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe. And a new star was born, too – quirky pop singer Lady Gaga became a search sensation the world over,” wrote Google in their December 1, Zeitgeist blog post.
Michael Jackson tops Google’s list of fastest rising global searches in 2009. The pop star is followed by social networking site, Facebook and its invite-only Spanish social networking rival, Tuenti. This top 10 list includes:
1) Michael Jackson
2) Facebook
3) Tuenti
4) Twitter
5) Sanalika
6) New Moon
7) Lady Gaga 
Windows 7
9) Dantri.com.vn
10) Torpedo Gratis
While Facebook and Twitter well known social-networking sites, two more social-networking sites managed to get themselves in the list; Spain’s Tuenti and Turkey’s Sanalika. The two other websites that made to the list are the Vietnamese portal dantri.com.vn and Portuguese SMS website Torpedo Gratis.
Yahoo’s list was also headed by Michael Jackson in the top place with the list as follows:
1) Michael Jackson
2) Twilight
3) WWE
4) Megan Fox
5) Britney Spears
6) Japanese anime character Naruto
7) American Idol
8)Kim Kardashian
9)NASCAR
10) and online role-playing game Runescape.
Yahoo said the dominance of pop culture in the searches shows that the internet is being used largely for entertainment purposes.
Many people login to facebook with the help of search engines, primarily Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL. Search engines help us find answers to information, but they can also help us get to websites without typing URLs. For example, type in “facebook login“ into Google and you can find FacebookLogin.net on the front page as the third result. Users all around the world can type in “facebook login“ into Google and then click on the link for FacebookLogin.net instead of having to type in double-u double-u double-u dot facebook login dot net.
The search “Facebook Login” ranked number 3 in the 2008 Google Zeitgeist for the fastest rising search phrases.
Google Zeitgeist 2008
