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Comment by timcederman | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why people always link to search terms when they want the site traffic which is also available on Google Trends.

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com&sa=N

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Anyone else find it interesting that you can't get google.com stats?

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=google.com&geo=all&#...

It is because people don't search for "google.com" while they are already on google.com. Google Trends only contains data for large search volume.

I've seen many people type "google" or "google.com" into google's search bar, while on google.com. Then they typed "facebook.com" into the search bar or something silly like that ...

I don't know where I heard this, but I was told that its very common for inexperienced internet users (of which there are many) to search for google in the search bar built into their browser, then click google to search for there.

My parents do that all the time. Often then typing the URL they wanted originally (and knew) in the google.com search bar after.

DONT DO IT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc

I can't be the only person who has mindlessly done that before.

Using "facebook.com" as a search keyword yields a strange result: there is a steady rise until the first days of January 2010 when a sudden drop of ~50% occurs. From then on, the curve remains flat.

Any idea of what happened?

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=facebook.com&sa=N

A guess: some major browser's search bar started to parse "facebook.com" as a domain rather than a search term?

That was my guess too, but which one?

I'm thinking FF 3.6, which came out January 21st. [1] If you zoom in on 2010, you'll see the drop happens around the end of January. [2]

[1] http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/

[2] http://trends.google.com/trends?q=facebook.com&ctab=0...

Actually now trends.google.com redirects to google.com/trends, which is the form used in the given link.

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