Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Facebook Overtakes Google Search
By Roger Browne

Hitwise, a web analysis business, said on its Analyst Weblog that Facebook was the most visited site last week, overtaking Google Search for the first time.

Hitwise suggests that Google Search accounted for 7.03% of US Internet visits last week, compared to 7.07% for Facebook.

If Google’s non-search services (Gmail, YouTube, Maps etc) are also included, Google remains in the lead with 11.03% of US Visits. Yahoo also beats Facebook, with 10.98% of US visits.

The Hitwise article includes this striking chart comparing the growth of Google Search and Facebook over the past year. Google Search has grown its traffic share just a few percent, whereas Facebook’s is more than two and a half times what it was just a year ago.

Does this mean that social sites are going to overtake search sites on the internet? Not so fast ... we might be seeing a see-sawing back and forth. In 2007 it was MySpace that was ahead of Google.

Update: This video at newsy.com provides some commentary on to Facebook’s growth, and speculates whether/how Facebook can capitalize on the advertising market as a result. [Thanks Dalena!]

Facebook Overtakes Google ... by Roger Browne | Comments (13)

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