| Facebook Tops Google As Most Popular US Website |
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16/03/2010 17:43 (697 Day 04:19 minutes ago) | |||||
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The FINANCIAL -- A new report by the online measurement service Hitwise showed that Facebook has reportedly overtaken Google to become the most visited Web site in the US. According to Hitwise, by overall traffic, Facebook Inc.'s Web site overtook Google in the week ending March 13.
The data provider said the privately held social-networking site's share was 7.07% for the week, compared with Google's 7.03%, The Wall Street Journal reports. The market share of visits to Facebook nearly tripled from a year earlier for the week, while visits to Google grew 9%.
According to the same source while it was the first time Facebook beat Google's market share for a full week, the company has reached the No. 1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day, as well as the weekend of March 6-7, according to Hitwise.
Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, wrote on her blog that last week’s overtaking of Google was a “milestone” for Facebook, which saw its market share of visits surge by 185 per cent compared with the same week in 2009, Financial Times reports. By comparison, Google’s market share rose by just 9 per cent during the same period.
Google and Facebook continue to dominate the web, accounting for 14 per cent of all site visits last week. According to World Wide Web Size, which tracks the size of the internet, there are currently more than 20bn web pages indexed by search engines, according to the same source. Facebook still has some catching up to do in order to overtake Google on a consistent basis.
TechCrunch, meanwhile, reports that comScore ranks Facebook far behind Google in terms of the percentage of the U.S. population using its Web site, as MSN Money informs. Google is visited by 81 percent of U.S. Internet users vs. Facebook's 53 percent.
According to MSN Money, TechCrunch also said that Facebook's rise in total traffic coincides directly with the rise of social games played on its site, like Farmville.
The New York Times reported that Facebook counts around 400 million users and has had large investments from the Microsoft Corp. and from Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies.
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