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If Google Trends is somewhat right, we've definitely reached peak Facebook: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook https://trends.google.c

If Google Trends is somewhat right, we've definitely reached peak Facebook: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook

alehul 10y ago
This is likely more indicative of society: A. Becoming more computer-literate and going straight to sites as opposed to always Googling it before clicking, even once familiar with the URL, which won't correlate to usage B. Visiting the site enough for AutoFill to take effect, which is ever-so-slightly inverse in correlation in terms of search popularity to site popularity Here's a FB-related search term people will still use, even with AutoFill for Facebook, as some evidence. The rise is a similar pattern, but lacking the major drop: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook%20contact https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook...
- anxrn 10y ago
  Agree. Another factor is mobile usage. The % of users that use Facebook _exclusively_ as an app is likely trending up as well.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  [facebook] was the most common search query when I was at Google (roughly the period covered by this graph), and [facebook login] would alternate between #2 and #3. Neither of your options seem likely at all to me - over the time I was there, I witnessed people becoming more likely to navigate to sites via Googling them rather than clicking, not less. The trend is even more pronounced with mobile, where basically nobody types in a URL, they use voice search and speak the name of the site. I would bet on the Facebook mobile app being a major cause, though. Instead of hitting the web version at all, they're opening the mobile app.
  - brockvond 10y ago
    I agree with this... also the rise of predictive searching in browsers and the omnibar etc.
  - perseusprime11 10y ago
    Also, why would you search for facebook anymore since everyone knows facebook.com site at this point.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Because search is the new navigation, whether you like it or not.
      - pizzetta 10y ago
        Yep, it's the new navigation because of search noted above and because of typo squatters with malware.
      - forrestthewoods 10y ago
        Not on mobile. Not to launch an app.
    - Frqy3 10y ago
      I never type in URLs directly. It is either a single click on the menu bar/blank tab, or else I go via a search engine to reduce the risk of landing on a typo squatter.
    - netsharc 10y ago
      I've seen several ads on TV and billboards which just say "Search for $brandname $productname" instead of a URL.
  - Waterluvian 10y ago
    Do people really voice search for things like that? Aside from drivers going hands-free, I have never seen a colleague or friend use voice commands where it wasn't just for the novelty.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      I do, and I've heard a bunch of my friends do it. On Android voice recognition is both fairly reliable and really easy, so why not?
      - Waterluvian 10y ago
        Yeah it absolutely is reliable and easy. I just haven't seen it catch on among my circles. Interesting.
        wutbrodo 10y ago
        IME, the first people in my friend group who started doing it were the ones who weren't insecure about looking "uncool" (so a combination of unapologetic techies and people without low self-esteem). Afaict, that's the main reason that people don't use a feature that would otherwise save tons of time.
        genofon 10y ago
        I'm not afraid of being seen as an uncool geeky, but I would never use it as I don't like to broadcast what I am looking for to all my neighbors, even when I am alone I prefer silence, typing now requires basically the same amount of time.
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      Also consider that people are less likely to use voice search if they are around others. So that might explain why you haven't seen friends/colleagues do it.
    - prodmerc 10y ago
  - autokad 10y ago
    80% of facebooks revenue comes from mobile, so i wouldnt be surprised if that contributed a lot. however, i dont see how facebook being #2 and #3 among searches means anything against the fact that most people either dont close facebook or as soon as they type 'f' facebook.com is autocomplete. unless you get to see how many autocompleted hits they are getting, you are experiencing a selection bias
  - deadowl 10y ago
    Was that also the case with people googling google.com? https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=google.com https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=google.com
  - alehul 10y ago
    With the native iOS app being released in 2012, the timeline would be perfect for that, yeah. Does the mobile app take away that much usage from the web? I can see how it'll increase overall usage as people will use FB when they otherwise couldn't, but I imagine anyone who could be using it on a computer will still use the web version over a mobile app (web seems more functional, especially so with the recent Facebook/Messenger division).
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      A lot of workplace usage has shifted to mobile. Many workplaces will monitor all your Internet usage, and so once mobile became available, many people decided that rather than letting their employers know how much time they waste during the day, they'd use their own private Internet connection for that. We saw a similar effect at Google with porn queries, particularly during the day. As soon as image search came to mobile Google, many porn queries moved to mobile; as of 2013 porn queries were twice as likely on mobile search as desktop.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  If this were true, we'd see similar drops in other popular sites like Amazon and Apple and Google itself. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook,google,amazon,yahoo,youtube https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook...
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    This shows the underlying utility of Facebook compared to other tech giants distilled in to a really generic scenario. - You go to Google to research what to buy. - You go to Amazon to give Amazon your hard earned money. - You go to Facebook to brag what you bought. Yet the market cap of Facebook rivals those two with far less revenue and highest multiplier. This cannot last.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      In theory the reason for this is that Facebook is "stickier" than Google or Amazon. If Google search isn't working for you, you can switch to something else in a heartbeat. If Facebook isn't working for you, you have to get all your friends to switch to something else before you can. The problem is this is also going to be Facebook's downfall at some indeterminate future date. Because if some other social network ever becomes more popular than Facebook, Facebook is over.
      - AznHisoka 10y ago
        Most people can't switch from google to something else in a heartbeat... we can email our friends, text them or meet them in the bar though.
        glibgil 10y ago
        I cannot email my friends
      - idiot_stick 10y ago
        I'm relatively tech savvy, but I'm not sure my significant other would know where to go if Google was down. DDG or even Bing are not top of mind. What else is there?
onewaystreet 10y ago
More like it's become ubiquitous.
isomorphic 10y ago
As an aside, I added Twitter to that for a sense of scale: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook,Twitter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook... (Short version: Facebook dwarfs Twitter.) However, the "Interest by region" is amusingly topical.
murukesh_s 10y ago
That is due to the mobile usage eating into desktop's. Zuckerberg realized it long before us and hence the whatsapp & Instagram acquisitions.
portman 10y ago
According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.
- the_rosentotter 10y ago
  No comparable web properties have the dropoff that Facebook has (twitter, eBay, craigslist, even Yahoo which seems to be fading faster into irrelevance by the day).
- rm999 10y ago
  Isn't that a plot of people who search Google for the term "google"? If so, I imagine it's something people who are familiar with computers and the internet do not do often.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Maybe Google did peak and now people are treating search engines as some white-label service that they're utterly indifferent to the provider of.
brockvond 10y ago
super interesting.
brilliantcode 10y ago
That graph looks scary for Facebook. Yet the share prices have not corrected to reflect it. 1 Tunisia 100 2 Turkey 95 3 Venezuela 95 4 Ecuador 87 5 Peru 86 6 Algeria 84 7 El Salvador 81 8 Serbia 77 9 Colombia 75 10 Dominican Republic Notice that none of the developed economies are showing up in the top 10. The dollar per user must be falling as users are increasingly coming from smaller economies which means less amount of ad revenue dollars. It makes sense why Zuckerberg is crazy for China. Without another spurt of user base growth, Facebook's share price will not be sustainable.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Mobile, mobile, mobile. In 2010 everybody would hit Facebook multiple times a day from their workplace. In 2017 nobody in the developed world uses their work computer to access Facebook, they pop open the Facebook app on their phone or have it open 24/7 on their home computer. The people left doing the Google -> Facebook routine are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones.
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    "are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones." As far as I know, they rather have a cheap smartphone, than a PC ...
  - funkyy 10y ago
    If they could make an official Facebook app less resource hogging, more user-friendly and usable on older mobile phones, they would be back in the game. But their app is probably the worst app you can have on your phone. It's terrible, slow and a joke. I would expect such an app from Verizon or GoDaddy, not from Facebook.
    - ikeyany 10y ago
      https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com
dosgonlogs 10y ago
Nope, not even close. That just shows that people started accessing Facebook through Smartphone apps, where the decline starts is where mobile use exploded.
SirensOfTitan 10y ago
Princeton researchers used the same flawed methodology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-princeton-researchers-infectious-disease https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
appleflaxen 10y ago
This might be the phenomenon by which ubiquitous things become part of the setting rather than the focus/subject. I've seen the point made with the railroad, and with the internet. If you look at other tech terms, they are all "declining": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=mobile,cellular,wireless,mobile,internet https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=mobile,c...
jgalt212 10y ago
so funny, May 2012 = 100, now = 37. yet over that time frame FB claims to have doubled their monthly active user numbers. something does not add up. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

If Google Trends is somewhat right, we've definitely reached peak Facebook: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook

alehul 10y ago

This is likely more indicative of society: A. Becoming more computer-literate and going straight to sites as opposed to always Googling it before clicking, even once familiar with the URL, which won't correlate to usage B. Visiting the site enough for AutoFill to take effect, which is ever-so-slightly inverse in correlation in terms of search popularity to site popularity Here's a FB-related search term people will still use, even with AutoFill for Facebook, as some evidence. The rise is a similar pattern, but lacking the major drop: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook%20contact https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook...

anxrn 10y ago
Agree. Another factor is mobile usage. The % of users that use Facebook _exclusively_ as an app is likely trending up as well.
nostrademons 10y ago
[facebook] was the most common search query when I was at Google (roughly the period covered by this graph), and [facebook login] would alternate between #2 and #3. Neither of your options seem likely at all to me - over the time I was there, I witnessed people becoming more likely to navigate to sites via Googling them rather than clicking, not less. The trend is even more pronounced with mobile, where basically nobody types in a URL, they use voice search and speak the name of the site. I would bet on the Facebook mobile app being a major cause, though. Instead of hitting the web version at all, they're opening the mobile app.
- brockvond 10y ago
  I agree with this... also the rise of predictive searching in browsers and the omnibar etc.
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  Also, why would you search for facebook anymore since everyone knows facebook.com site at this point.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Because search is the new navigation, whether you like it or not.
    - pizzetta 10y ago
      Yep, it's the new navigation because of search noted above and because of typo squatters with malware.
    - forrestthewoods 10y ago
      Not on mobile. Not to launch an app.
  - Frqy3 10y ago
    I never type in URLs directly. It is either a single click on the menu bar/blank tab, or else I go via a search engine to reduce the risk of landing on a typo squatter.
  - netsharc 10y ago
    I've seen several ads on TV and billboards which just say "Search for $brandname $productname" instead of a URL.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  Do people really voice search for things like that? Aside from drivers going hands-free, I have never seen a colleague or friend use voice commands where it wasn't just for the novelty.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    I do, and I've heard a bunch of my friends do it. On Android voice recognition is both fairly reliable and really easy, so why not?
    - Waterluvian 10y ago
      Yeah it absolutely is reliable and easy. I just haven't seen it catch on among my circles. Interesting.
      - wutbrodo 10y ago
        IME, the first people in my friend group who started doing it were the ones who weren't insecure about looking "uncool" (so a combination of unapologetic techies and people without low self-esteem). Afaict, that's the main reason that people don't use a feature that would otherwise save tons of time.
        genofon 10y ago
        I'm not afraid of being seen as an uncool geeky, but I would never use it as I don't like to broadcast what I am looking for to all my neighbors, even when I am alone I prefer silence, typing now requires basically the same amount of time.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Also consider that people are less likely to use voice search if they are around others. So that might explain why you haven't seen friends/colleagues do it.
  - prodmerc 10y ago
- autokad 10y ago
  80% of facebooks revenue comes from mobile, so i wouldnt be surprised if that contributed a lot. however, i dont see how facebook being #2 and #3 among searches means anything against the fact that most people either dont close facebook or as soon as they type 'f' facebook.com is autocomplete. unless you get to see how many autocompleted hits they are getting, you are experiencing a selection bias
- deadowl 10y ago
  Was that also the case with people googling google.com? https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=google.com https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=google.com
- alehul 10y ago
  With the native iOS app being released in 2012, the timeline would be perfect for that, yeah. Does the mobile app take away that much usage from the web? I can see how it'll increase overall usage as people will use FB when they otherwise couldn't, but I imagine anyone who could be using it on a computer will still use the web version over a mobile app (web seems more functional, especially so with the recent Facebook/Messenger division).
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    A lot of workplace usage has shifted to mobile. Many workplaces will monitor all your Internet usage, and so once mobile became available, many people decided that rather than letting their employers know how much time they waste during the day, they'd use their own private Internet connection for that. We saw a similar effect at Google with porn queries, particularly during the day. As soon as image search came to mobile Google, many porn queries moved to mobile; as of 2013 porn queries were twice as likely on mobile search as desktop.
nerdponx 10y ago
If this were true, we'd see similar drops in other popular sites like Amazon and Apple and Google itself. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook,google,amazon,yahoo,youtube https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook...
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  This shows the underlying utility of Facebook compared to other tech giants distilled in to a really generic scenario. - You go to Google to research what to buy. - You go to Amazon to give Amazon your hard earned money. - You go to Facebook to brag what you bought. Yet the market cap of Facebook rivals those two with far less revenue and highest multiplier. This cannot last.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    In theory the reason for this is that Facebook is "stickier" than Google or Amazon. If Google search isn't working for you, you can switch to something else in a heartbeat. If Facebook isn't working for you, you have to get all your friends to switch to something else before you can. The problem is this is also going to be Facebook's downfall at some indeterminate future date. Because if some other social network ever becomes more popular than Facebook, Facebook is over.
    - AznHisoka 10y ago
      Most people can't switch from google to something else in a heartbeat... we can email our friends, text them or meet them in the bar though.
      - glibgil 10y ago
        I cannot email my friends
    - idiot_stick 10y ago
      I'm relatively tech savvy, but I'm not sure my significant other would know where to go if Google was down. DDG or even Bing are not top of mind. What else is there?

onewaystreet 10y ago

More like it's become ubiquitous.

isomorphic 10y ago

As an aside, I added Twitter to that for a sense of scale: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook,Twitter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook... (Short version: Facebook dwarfs Twitter.) However, the "Interest by region" is amusingly topical.

murukesh_s 10y ago

That is due to the mobile usage eating into desktop's. Zuckerberg realized it long before us and hence the whatsapp & Instagram acquisitions.

portman 10y ago

According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.

the_rosentotter 10y ago
No comparable web properties have the dropoff that Facebook has (twitter, eBay, craigslist, even Yahoo which seems to be fading faster into irrelevance by the day).
rm999 10y ago
Isn't that a plot of people who search Google for the term "google"? If so, I imagine it's something people who are familiar with computers and the internet do not do often.
astrodust 10y ago
Maybe Google did peak and now people are treating search engines as some white-label service that they're utterly indifferent to the provider of.

brockvond 10y ago

super interesting.

brilliantcode 10y ago

That graph looks scary for Facebook. Yet the share prices have not corrected to reflect it. 1 Tunisia 100 2 Turkey 95 3 Venezuela 95 4 Ecuador 87 5 Peru 86 6 Algeria 84 7 El Salvador 81 8 Serbia 77 9 Colombia 75 10 Dominican Republic Notice that none of the developed economies are showing up in the top 10. The dollar per user must be falling as users are increasingly coming from smaller economies which means less amount of ad revenue dollars. It makes sense why Zuckerberg is crazy for China. Without another spurt of user base growth, Facebook's share price will not be sustainable.

nostrademons 10y ago
Mobile, mobile, mobile. In 2010 everybody would hit Facebook multiple times a day from their workplace. In 2017 nobody in the developed world uses their work computer to access Facebook, they pop open the Facebook app on their phone or have it open 24/7 on their home computer. The people left doing the Google -> Facebook routine are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones.
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  "are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones." As far as I know, they rather have a cheap smartphone, than a PC ...
- funkyy 10y ago
  If they could make an official Facebook app less resource hogging, more user-friendly and usable on older mobile phones, they would be back in the game. But their app is probably the worst app you can have on your phone. It's terrible, slow and a joke. I would expect such an app from Verizon or GoDaddy, not from Facebook.
  - ikeyany 10y ago
    https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com

dosgonlogs 10y ago

Nope, not even close. That just shows that people started accessing Facebook through Smartphone apps, where the decline starts is where mobile use exploded.

SirensOfTitan 10y ago

Princeton researchers used the same flawed methodology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-princeton-researchers-infectious-disease https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

appleflaxen 10y ago

This might be the phenomenon by which ubiquitous things become part of the setting rather than the focus/subject. I've seen the point made with the railroad, and with the internet. If you look at other tech terms, they are all "declining": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=mobile,cellular,wireless,mobile,internet https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=mobile,c...

jgalt212 10y ago

so funny, May 2012 = 100, now = 37. yet over that time frame FB claims to have doubled their monthly active user numbers. something does not add up. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...