Facebook ‘overtakes Google’ as most-visited site in US
- Added:
- Mar 18, 2010
Facebook has become the most-visited site in the US after overtaking Google, according to new data from Hitwise.
The popular social networking page toppled the search giant after accounting for 7.07% of all US web traffic compared to Google's 7.03%.
However, the research did not include other Google services such as Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube.
"It's definitely a big moment for Facebook, even though they beat by a small margin," News.com.au quoted Hitwise's Matt Tatham as telling CNN. "People want information from friends they trust, versus the anonymity of a search engine."
The "important milestone," as described by Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 percent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.
By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only nine percent in the same time.
Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 percent of the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.
Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking feature Buzz to its Gmail service.
Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.
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