In an interesting testament to what users consume on the Internet, YouTube has just passed Yahoo! for the #3 spot of the “most visited” sites on Alexa. Numbers 1 and 2, as you might expect, belong to Google and Facebook respectively, but YouTube’s launch into the 3rd slot is an interesting change.

The question still remains, of course, as to what Yahoo! is. The company seems to want to position itself as a portal, still, but the browsing habits of the general public tend toward the more specific instead of the suggested.

Interestingly, the #1 incoming search result for YouTube is, in fact “YouTube”. While this might be indicative of how people use their browser, it’s also likely that an increasing market share by Google’s Chrome has some bearing. Given the Chrome use of a single “Omnibar” it’s possible that people are simply typing “YouTube” and leaving off the .com portion, resulting in a search rather than a direct call to the URL.

It is fair to note that the #3 ranking is an Alexa Traffic Rank. While it is a somewhat reliable indicator of worldwide site popularity, the results have been called into question a number of times.

For those interested, the round-out of the top 10 goes like this:

Yahoo!
Live.com
Baidu
Wikipedia
Blogger
MSN.com
Twitter