Overall Facebook had four of the top 10 search terms for 2011, the same as in 2010. However query volume for the collection of Facebook terms grew 33 percent vs. last year.

Top search queries of 2010 and 2011

What’s noteworthy is that all of the top 10 are navigational queries. Beyond the top 10, Hitwise said that “social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010.”

According to Hitwise, the top 10 websites visited in the US were the following:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Youtube
4. Mail.yahoo.com
5. Yahoo
6. Bing
7. Search.yahoo.com
8. Gmail
9. Mail.live.com
10. MSN.com

The biggest “mover” among the top 10 queries and websites was Myspace, which exited in accordance with its precipitous decline in traffic. There’s more analysis of the year’s top search queries by category in the Hitwise blog post.

Curiously, Facebook doesn’t appear on any of the “top lists” issued by Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL (see below). With Google’s list, at least, it’s based on “rising” queries rather than those most popular overall.

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Bing gained 3% between September and October, going from 12.8% market share to 13.23%, while Yahoo also rose slightly from 15.27% to 15.39%. Combined, that boosted Bing-powered share among major search engines to 28.62% … still a far cry from Google’s estimated 65.38% of the US search market.

Meanwhile, more interesting to me is Hitwise’s take on search query lengths. In the same news release today, Hitwise estimates that 27.23% of searches were one word long in October. That number is up from 26.45% in September. Hitwise tells me this is desktop searches only — mobile search is not included. (Mobile is where you’d expect shorter queries to be more prevalent.)

Not much of a month-to-month gain, but a little over a year ago, I wrote about query length on my own blog and shared a Hitwise chart that covered searches in September 2010. Notice that, at the time, Hitwise estimated one-word searches to be only 22.72% of all queries.

So, over 13 months, Hitwise is saying that one-word search queries have risen from 22.72% to 27.23%. There are a lot of implications in that for business owners and marketers — implications that are best left for a separate article, or for the comments below if you prefer.

Hitwise explains that this is pretty normal: Google’s market share has risen for five of the past six Septembers, while Yahoo’s has declined in each of the past five Septembers.

It was just six months ago that Hitwise credited Bing-powered search — i.e., Bing and Yahoo together — with slightly more than 30% market share.

Hitwise says Bing-powered search accounted for 28.99% of all searches last month, up from 28.05% the previous month.

But in the bigger picture, Bing-powered search has upped its market share by about 4% since Yahoo began using Bing’s search results. That change was completed back on August 24, 2010. A couple weeks after that, Experian Hitwise said that Bing and Yahoo had a combined 24.56% market share in the U.S. during the first week of the partnership.

Where’d the Bing-Yahoo gains come from? According to the Hitwise numbers, they came at Google’s expense. In August 2010, Hitwise reported Google’s market share at 71.59%; as the chart above shows, that’s now down to about 65%.

Small gains? For sure. And that’s exactly what Microsoft CEO said in March 2010, when he keynoted our SMX West conference: “Tomorrow’s goal is to gain a few points, a tenth here, a tenth there, and just keep working and working.”

In a blog post today, Bill Tancer uses the company’s “Mosaic” lifestyle segmentation system to conclude that the Google+ audience is expanding.

… in just over six weeks, we’ve moved from innovators to early adopters to early mainstream users visiting the new social network.

An accompanying chart shows that Google+ was initially a big hit with the “colleges and cafes” crowd (described as “young singles and recent college graduates living in college communities”), but that community is visiting Google+ less over the past month. (see red line below)

Meanwhile, the “Status Seeking Singles” segment adopted Google+ early (green line above) and continues to make up a large part of the userbase now, along with a group that Experian Hitwise calls “Kids and Cabernet.” The latter segment is described as “prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs.” (dark blue line above)

Experian suggests that this “Kids and Cabernet” group is the first sign of Google+ adoption beyond innovators and early adopters and that watching the future migration of other lifestyle segments will help indicate if Google+ will become a legitimate Facebook competitor.

And what remains to be seen in the immediate future is if this week’s launch of games on Google+ has any impact on the types of people that visit the site consistently.

These numbers are somewhat similar to what comScore shared yesterday, with Yahoo also on the rise last month.

As the video below shows, the MapQuest LBC functions very much like Google’s and Bing’s and offers many of the same basic features such as photo uploads, videos, categories and so forth. MapQuest is also offering two premium listing levels at $99 and $399 per year — the latter of which includes distribution of business information to other sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, SuperPages and others.

The MapQuest Local Business Center is currently available to US businesses only. Here’s the MapQuest intro video that shows how it works:

It’s been more than two years since Google Maps surpassed MapQuest as the number one mapping destination in the US, but MapQuest remains a healthy number two in the latest Hitwise travel category market share chart:

Aside from that, MapQuest is also a frequent source of local citations inside Google Maps, so I’d expect local search marketers to welcome the addition of this new MapQuest LBC tool.

According to the latest Experian Hitwise data, Bing and Yahoo both grew more than 5% in March and now combine for 30.01% market share.

Google continues to have more than twice their combined market share, but dropped a couple percentage points in March to 64.42%, Hitwise says.

According to Compete, both Google and Yahoo very modestly lost share, AOL and Ask were flat while Bing gained:

• All engines except Bing experienced a decline in unique visitors in February, with Bing seeing a 7.6% increase in UVs MOM
• Bing Powered engines (Yahoo! and Bing) continued to increase its share of market to 30.8%

Bing continues to show incremental traction.

The big difference between the Hitwise, comScore and Compete data is that Compete shows Bing now ahead of Yahoo, while comScore and Hitwise show Yahoo leading Bing. Hitwise, however, shows Bing and Yahoo much closer together than comScore, which still has Yahoo ahead by a little under three points.

All the usual caveats apply to taking one month’s data and inferring or extrapolating too much from it.

Search activity spiked late last week in response to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the two sites benefitting the most in terms of web traffic were MSNBC and YouTube. That’s according to a series of tweets from Experian Hitwise this afternoon.

As the image above shows, Hitwise says that the phrase “japan earthquake” had more search activity than always-popular one-word brand terms like “google” and “mapquest.” In a separate tweet, Hitwise shared a chart showing that five of the top 20 search terms on March 11 were related to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Where’d all this search activity lead? Hitwise says:

MSNBC.com received the most traffic, 13.66%, from the search term “japan earthquake” on Mar 11th. YouTube ranked 2nd w/9.17%.

And a day later, Hitwise says those two sites were still getting the most traffic from that term, though they switched placed.

On Mar 12th, YouTube received the most traffic, 12.17%, from search term “japan earthquake” & MSNBC was 2nd w/11.12%.

In addition, Hitwise tweeted out a couple other stats about Japan-related search activity:

• The five fastest-moving search terms last week in the US were all Japan-related.
• The top 15 — and 29 of the top 30 — fastest moving search terms that sent traffic to YouTube were related to Japan.

Twitter Activity & The Japan Earthquake

In its blog post today about activity levels, Twitter didn’t specifically call out the situation in Japan but, as I noted in our article, tweet activity was way up on March 11th (the day of the earthquake and tsunami), and new Twitter signups were up substantially on March 12th.

But Topsy’s new Social Analytics tool provides a snapshot of tweet activity, as Royal Pingdom pointed out today. Here’s what Topsy shows for activity related to three terms: japan, earthquake and tsunami:

The Topsy stats for those terms also reveals some of the most popular links and tweets related to the Japanese disaster. At the moment, that top content includes appeals to donate to the Red Cross, photos and videos from several news sources, and even Bing’s unfortunate tweet that some took as an effort to gain exposure in exchange for donations.

Postscript: What about Facebook, you ask? Well, there are no exact numbers in this, but All Facebook points out a series of world maps that Facebook has posted, which show the spread of Japan-related status updates.