You can tell it's December when annual Top 10 lists start appearing left, right and centre -- but at least Google's most popular search results (just issued to the media) have the virtue of being based on millions of searches rather than just some bored hack's guesswork. Mind you, the actual top searches do tend to suggest that we're a fairly thick bunch: why would you type Google into Google itself? More interesting from a Lifehacker point of view are the fastest rising terms, which include iPhone, YouTube, Firefox 3 and wiki. Here's the ten most popular terms overall:

1. Games
2. Sydney
3. YouTube
4. MySpace
5. Facebook
6. Google
7. eBay
8. My
9. Weather
10. Hotmail

This list inspired a lot of comments, many of the "why do people need to search for a site like Facebook" variety. While that might seem like odd behaviour to those of us who tend to type Control-L and then enter web addresses for Firefox to finish, it turns out to be very common. "41 percent of users are using Google as a navigation tool," Google Australia general manager Karim Temsamani explained at the company's Christmas media event last night. That explains why some people type in 'Youtube', but the popularity of 'Google' itself as a search term is still a slight mystery. (I like the theory that people type 'Google' into the browser search box to get at the Google site, but wonder if anyone who knows about the search box would then deliberately ignore it the rest of the time.

Story from Lifehacker Australia