Inside Facebook

Facebook was buy far the most-searched term in July, according to a fresh look by Compete at the data today. Among the fastest-growing terms, it was searched for 69.5 million times. Number two was Craigslist, in distant second, with 32.9 million queries.

The number of searches for a company often correlates with its overall popularity. Facebook got much more popular this year, growing 495 percent from 11.7 million in July of the previous year. Microblogging psuedo-rival Twitter also saw notable growth, going from only 300,000 queries in July of 2008 to 4.68 million this July, an increase of 1,461 percent.

As a reference point, Google Trends shows searches for Facebook continuing a halting climb through this month. Twitter, is staying relatively flat, although it continues to get relatively more press coverage, according to Trends. Note: It’s not clear if the drop-off in press coverage that both sites are apparently seeing now is an actual drop-off, or just an incomplete projection of the most recent data.