Hacker News Reader

Comment by omarish | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anybody types "porn" when looking for porn.. I could probably join on three more terms and exceed facebook: http://tr.im/dvoc.

Just a thought -- you get what you measure.

View on HN

Except that you don't exceed it with the example you cited. Facebook is clearly doing much better than those terms, starting at about 4Q 2008.

Regardless, I'm pointing out the effect that just adding a couple more points will significantly increase the results. This is more-so a proof that the example is not significant because of the variance of adding another term. Good point, though.

I don't understand why someone would google for "facebook" in the first place (or at least, more than once). I wonder how accurately the web search traffic for facebook correlates with its actual usage/popularity.

A surprisingly large number of people always use their favorite search engine to get to other sites. They Google for "facebook" or "www.facebook.com". This goes for all web sites.

I do it all the time. With all these web 2.0 domain names I can never be sure was it wufoo or woofu or woofoo dot com. But google is sure.

That's the nice thing about firefox. Once I visit a site a few times it comes up in a list when I start typing the site. And if it's not in my list, I can just google it right from my address bar.

A lot of people use google instead of typing in URLs. So to get to facebook, people go to google, then type in facebook or facebook.com, and then go from there.

I think some of this is driven from the google toolbar, which many people confuse with the address bar.

On a side note, what really boggles the mind is the number of searches for "google" or "google.com". According to the Keyword Tool, there were approximately 30mil exact searches for "google", and 7.4mil searches for "google.com"!

Some browsers will google search a term typed into the address bar if it is not a fully specified URL. On my system, if I just type "google" into an address bar, it directs me to the google search for "google".

Another thing to note which significantly alters the analysis is that facebook is a brand in any country whereas porn (or the other such search terms) come mostly from english speakers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com