Australia: the land of the lazy Googler

03/12/09 posted by Liz Niland

The results are in and... Australian Googlers are lazy. From results released this week by the good people at Google, the top 10 Aussie searches of 2009 are:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. Hotmail
4. eBay
5. MySpace
6. Google
7. Yahoo
8. Gmail
9. Bebo
10. Seek

Firstly, let's not even talk about #6.

Rather than type “www.facebook.com” into their browser’s address bar, a truckload of Aussies seem to prefer to go to Google and search for “Facebook”. Is it possible not many punters know how to use their browser’s bookmarking facility? Whatever the reason, Google have capitalised on this behaviour in the Google Chrome browser by combining the address bar with the search bar. So if you’re one of the lazy Googlers, you know what you need to download!

Across in the US, some of the fastest rising search results were for the late, great King of Pop - Michael Jackson - second only to 2009‘s mushroom, Twitter. Over at Bing HQ, the results returned a similar picture with MJ and Twitter pulling the gold and silver respectively. Other dearly departed celebrities also featured in the top 10, including Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze and US infomercial personality Billy Mays.

Bing's top 10:

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twitter
3. Swine flu
4. Stock market
5. Farrah Fawcett
6. Patrick Swayze
7. Cash for clunkers
8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
9. Billy Mays
10. Jaycee Dugard