WebProNews

This article's going to lead off with two admissions: yes, 2008 ended a while ago, and sure, the majority of WebProNews readers don't live in the UK.  A list from Hitwise names the 10 most searched-for brands from that year and in that region, though, and since it's quite new and rather interesting, we're delving into it. 

Facebook managed to secure the top spot.  This would be a real feather in Mark Zuckerberg's cap under any condition, and is even more important given the recent terms of service hubbub; critics may have to admit that a few lines of legalese aren't likely to extinguish such an overwhelming amount of interest.

Then came Bebo.  The sum of $850 million that AOL paid for it still sounds like quite a lot to Americans, but this ranking at least demonstrates that people elsewhere in the world are interested in the social network.  eBay nabbed third place, which may also counteract a few concerns.

YouTube wound up fourth, a retailer called Argos was fifth, then MySpace, Amazon, and the BBC followed in sixth, seventh, and eighth places, respectively.  Autotrader was tenth, which leaves us with ninth place and Yahoo.

It's not a huge shock to see Yahoo here; it's popular enough in some circles, plus the whole Microsoft mess must have generated some searches.  What's interesting is that Yahoo's ranking draws attention to the absence of Google.  We can only guess that most of the queries Hitwise monitored were performed from either Google.com or Google.co.uk, making it an unlikely search term.