lean back surfing

If you thought surfers are a lean forward active and engaged crowd, you're wrong.
Judging from the Google Zeitgeist 2009, surfers are really lazy.

How else can you explain that many of the fastest growing search terms are social networks related? Rather than typing 'Facebook.com' in their browser, they type 'facebook' on Google, to click through.
Not convinced by my argument? In Belgium 'Google' ranks amongst the fastest growing search terms on ...Google. Two possible explanations: those folks are completely crazy (not to be excluded completely) or they are plain lazy.

Between crazy and lazy, based upon my own experience I choose the latter (you would not expect me to admit I'm crazy, would you?).
I have a search bar open all the time and rather than opening my browser and typing in the url, I just type in the search term and click through from within Google. I actually do this quite often to surf to sites that I visit on a regular basis and where I know that Google will enable me to click through to the page that is of interest to me rather than having to navigate through the site, which is much more time consuming.

Now that I come to think of it, i actually do this several times per day and it would consist of the majority of my 'Search' activity. I realize that this is n=1 and that this is probably not a solid enough sample size to explain global search behaviour.

So it would be interesting to find out how people do actually search and what % of search is real search vs using Google as a 'guide'. Behaviour of one vs the other is different. If I search, than I will consider the different options. In the other case, I can almost blindly click through to the exact site or page I am looking for...

I would really be interested to see the absolute numbers and the top ranking search tersm, rather than trends. I believe MSN publish absolute numbers...