Hitwise is running a report on the top search term in the United States for the week ending March 14, 2009, and interestingly the data revealed that “Craigslist” is the top search term for the week ending March 14, 2009. According to the Hitwise blog post, this is the first time that Craigslist topped the said report, finally overtaking MySpace which has been on the top spot since March 2006. This registers a 105 percent increase searches for the “Craigslist” from the same week last year.
If indeed Hitwise’s data is accurate, we couldn’t agree more when they say that this could probably the effects of the economic crisis, as more and more U.S. folks are turning to “Craigslist” for possible employment rather than wasting time on MySpace and Facebook. Facebook as the search terms ranked third in the search report.
However, the data received quite a good number of both positive and negative reactions from the crowd. Michael was quick to berate the Hitwise report and even presented his own search trending for the terms, Craigslist, MySpace, and Facebook using Google Trends. And in the said results, Facebook is at the top spot followed by MySpace then Craigslist.
Although both Google Trends data and Hitwise data may each have their inconsistencies, we’ll just take it to mean that Hitwise data is pretty accurate especially since the difference stood only at .1%.
Completing Hitwise’s top search terms are YouTube and eBay, with eBay topping list for the Top Paid Search Term based on U.S. clicks. Now, could the economic recession also be the reason for more people clicking on eBay paid links?
