It looks like Mark Zuckerberg is going to have to make more room in his trophy case.  Hitwise has devised a new metric termed "breadth volume," and Facebook is beating brands like Google, Yahoo, and Craigslist is this respect by quite a lot.

First, here’s an explanation of exactly what we’re talking about: Hitwise’s Bill Tancer wrote, "We’re now able to provide a new search metric beyond volume (search volume for a specific term over all term volume) and breadth (# of search term variations over all search term variations), our new metric which I’ll call breadth volume, sums the volume for all variations on a root term."

As for the actual rankings, Facebook came in first for the week ending March 27th with a breadth volume of 2.80 percent.  Google came in second with a breadth volume of 2.40 percent, and then things really dropped off as Yahoo, Craigslist, and MySpace showed up in the rankings with breadth volumes of 1.60 percent, 1.10 percent, and 1.10 percent again (in a tie).

Tancer even created a graph to show how Facebook is extending its lead over the competition.

This could translate into more good news for the social network in terms of attracting advertisers, investors, and users.