“Craigslist” topped “myspace” as the top search term in the U.S. for the first time in three years earlier this month, according to a blog post by Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise.
This highlights “the increasing popularity of online classifieds during the economic downturn,” wrote Dougherty.
For the week ending March 14, 2009, 0.60 percent of U.S. search term clicks were for “craigslist,” reflecting a 105 percent increase from the week ending March 15, 2008.
“Myspace” received 0.59 percent of searches for the same week, a 7 percent decline from the corresponding time period last year.
“Facebook,” not surprisingly, saw the largest year-over-year percent increase as it received 0.45 percent of searches, a whopping 415 percent boost from last year’s 0.09 percent.
“Ebay” saw its clicks decline 15 percent to 0.33 percent, while “youtube” received 8 percent more clicks as it finished the week at 0.20 percent of all searches.
During the same week, “ebay” was the top paid search term, attracting 0.04 percent of paid clicks, down 77 percent from 0.16 percent last year.
“Ebay.com,” “yellow pages,” “home depot” and “netflix” all finished the week ending March 14, 2009 with 0.01 percent of paid clicks. All of these paid search terms, with the exception of “home depot,” experienced declines from last year. “Home depot” saw a year-over-year boost of 1,086 percent.
Michael Arrington posted his findings using Google Trends and blasted Hitwise’s data as “bad.”
The Google Trends data indicates exactly the opposite of Hitwise’s findings, showing that “facebook” received the most searches, followed by “myspace” then “craigslist.”
Either way, searches for “craigslist” are increasing, and along with the evidence that “ebay” paid searches are increasing it’s clear that the obvious trend towards job searching and bargain purchases is currently in vogue.
Sources:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2009/03/craigslist_top_search_term_las.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/20/new-hitwise-stats-show-how-bad-hitwise-data-is/
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