Sunday, July 31, 2011

Facebook beats Google as the most commonly typed domain in the address bar


"Facebook.com" is by far the most common URL that people type into the address bar of their internet browser.

People are typing "facebook.com" almost three times more often than "google.com."

The URL statistics were published on July 25 by Christopher Finke, a software engineer and the creator of URL Fixer, a browser add-on that fixes human errors that are typed in the address bar on your internet browser.

Facebook.com is the most popular domain and accounts for 9 percent of all typed domains. Google.com is the second most typed address and accounts for 3.3 percent of all typed domains.

Youtube.com, gmail.com, twitter.com, mail.google.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, amazon.com and reddit.com also feature in the top ten most typed domains according to Finke.

According to website traffic monitoring company Alexa, the top 10 sites on the web by the amount of traffic they receive are, in order: Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Live, Baidu, Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN and Tencent.

Finke notes in the comments on his blog that while "All of Facebook's properties (*.facebook.com) combine [to make up] 9.4% [of all typed domains]; all of Google's (*.google.com, YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) combine for at least 9.7%."

"The only locales where neither Google nor Facebook control the most popular domain are ru-RU (Russia - vkontakte.ru), fi-FI (Finland - aapeli.com, a gaming website), ko-KR (Korea - fomos.kr, an e-sports website), and zh-CN (China - baidu.com)," reveals Finke.

Not surprisingly, people often make mistakes when entering addresses into their URL bar and end up with all kinds of typos. Frequent variations on the top level domain ".com" include .com\, .ocm, .con, .cmo, .copm, .xom, ".com,", .vom, .comn, .com', ".co,", .comj, .coim, .cpm, .colm, .conm, and .coom.

"The website that appears to benefit the most from users mistyping a legitimate URL is faceboook.com (count the o's)," says Finke.

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