Google attracted more than one billion people worldwide to its web sites in May, marking the first time that an Internet firm has drawn in that many visitors in one month, according to research from ComScore.
The search giant saw the number of unique visitors to its site increase by 8.4% from 931 million a year ago.
Across the world, Google saw its greatest numbers in India and South Africa, which accounted for 14.3% and 13.5% of all site visitors, collectively.
The lowest numbers were in South Korea and China, which accounted for 0.7% and 0.8% of total worldwide visitors, collectively.
Microsoft grabbed the number 2 spot with 905 million visitors last month, according to ComScore.
Facebook took third place with 714 million visitors, up 30 percent since a year ago, while Yahoo trailed with 689 visitors, a 10.8 percent gain over the past year.
Up until last October, Yahoo had held the third spot, but since then Facebook has outpaced it each month with more visitors.
Though Google captured the most visitors last month, users collectively spent the most time at Facebook–250 billion minutes in May, compared with 200 billion minutes at Google and 204 billion at Microsoft.
ComScore’s numbers are based on its “global measurement panel” of two million Internet users, which the research firm then refines with “page view” data that it receives from 90 of the 100 publishers of Web content, though not from Google.
Source: www.comscore.com