Palo Alto, Calif. - Facebook surpassed News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace in U.S. Web traffic for the first time ever in the month of May, TechCrunch reported, citing data from Internet audience measurement firm comScore. Facebook counted 70.278 million unique visitors last month, compared to MySpace's 70.255 million.

Last week, we did a blog post on the top categories visited by Canadian internet users. We followed that up with a post looking at the number of words used in queries. To follow this theme, today we are posting on what Canadians are searching for online. The following table shows the top search terms entered into search engines by Canadian Internet users in the twelve weeks to 30th May 2009. The table is divided into two columns to show the highest volume navigational search terms (meaning that most searchers had a clear intent to reach a particular website) and the highest volume generic terms.

New York - The number of Americans who listen to online radio at least once a week grew to 42 million, up from 33 million in 2008, according to a new study from Arbitron and Edison Research. Nearly half of the U. S. population, or 49%, 125 million people, have at least once listened to online radio.

What do people search for on Twitter? We collected search terms that we took place within Twitter’s search engine to identify the topics that are being searched most often on Twitter for the week ending March 21, 2009. Searches for the vampire series ‘twilight’ were the most popular for the week overall fueled by the US release of the DVD, followed by ‘redco’, and ‘parkersburg’.

Is Twitter, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt opined last week, the poor man's email? Is it a Facebook or Google killer? What can clickstream data tell us about how people are using Twitter and how does that compare to email, Facebook and search engines? The following table shows the top 20 websites visited after Twitter.com in February:

For the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube. Previously, YouTube consistently ranked 10th among all websites by market share of visits until the week ending Jan. 10, 2009, where Gmail moved up one rank to reach #10. The websites have been swapping positions regularly ever since.

I noticed Ryan Spoon's blog post (via Techmeme) on PerezHilton.com's growth this morning. I have followed the Perez Hilton site (for purely professional reasons) for some time. The website ranked #398 among All Categories of websites last week and #5 among Entertainment - Personalities websites (based on share of US Internet visits).

January is the peak season for visits to employment websites and with unemployment numbers climbing ever higher, this year was no exception. Each year, visits to employment websites peak the second week of January. This year visits to websites in the Employment and Training category were 17% higher than in January 2008. Growth is due to continued natural growth for the category (see chart below illustrating that visits have been growing for the past three years), as well as rising unemployment rates and job uncertainty.

Reston, Va. - U.S. Internet users watched a record 14.3 billion online videos during December, an increase of 13% from the previous year, with YouTube (NASD: GOOG) again leading the way with nearly 6 billion streams, or 41% of all U.S. video traffic, according to a report from market research firm comScore.