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Although the "thud" wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.
The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.
Heather Dougherty explained, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame."
Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: "Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week."
Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.
it’s not surprising considering that facebook is a lot more sticky than google, although i think google still has a role to play with search, it’s only natural that they would use google less because once you’re done searching you move onto something else
Reply to affiliate marketing tips: To say that Google is on its way out because a site with a completely different purpose has surpassed Google in visits is to miss the point entirely. The 2 sites aren’t competing for a single audience, they have unique reasons for existing. Apples & oranges.
Using Google with Facebook is Great! along with Twitter, if you can capitalize on the 3 Triad. Works great spreading your brand and digital word of mouth.
And where is Yahoo in all this. traditionally Yahoo has been the most popular site on the internet. Did it fall? If so how far? And when?
I think those predicting the early death of Google are mad. Facebook is a sticky site and it is a natural first (and repeat) destination. What the graph doesn’t show is engagement and length of time spent on the site and whether people are using Facebook purely to keep in touch with friends or for business. I would be interested to see those number, otherwise its simply a bit of sensationalism which is interesting but not indicative of a wholesale change of internet usage habits.
This information alone is not sufficient to make any judgment. One has to look at different aspects.
Try Alexa and compare the sites, then you will know more information and be able to understand situation.
More and more people realize Facebook is an excellent place to share your business.
Although I’m on FB all the time, and create online presences for companies that I work for, Google is clearly better for search, whereas Facebook is great for social networking, which aren’t 100% interchangeable…
Maybe this just means that we’re all spending too much time thinking of something witty to say to post on Facebook!!!
Facebook, like Twitter when used correctly is a fantastic business tool. I am a fan!
I think FaceBook (FB) is a once a week website to visit much like Twitter. Twitter does not come close to FB. Twitter is a thing of the past. Limited characters no pictures no good. Great for a small business much like instant messages.
How can someone have 500 or even 7,000 followers and you are expected to look at all the tweets What a joke.
Google is great for searches and Blogs but Yahoo is probably the best website for news and events as well as searches and Blogs.
thewebsiteboostercom
JRATL
All the hours you spend building your social networking pages for business purposes could fall by the wayside someday. Either the fad site you are using will fade or become pass
Pretty good list of social networking sites you have there. The killer list, though, would be of serch engines ……… now that would be an interesting read.
Despite Facebook appears as the winner of the week we should not forget the Power concentrated on Google. They can market and rung marketing campaigns around the globe from Arizona to Quito Ecuador. This means Google has the traffic but facebook is getting the people which is something Google is actually trying to do desperately, to position themselves at the 2.0 Blogsphere.
Mauri
I’d love to see the metric of % of time wasted on Facebook versus the time spent learning something with Google.
Everyone I know goes to Facebook to play games and socialize.
If I need something for my car or home or need information on a technical computer question
I don’t go to Facebook.
I go to Google.
Facebook is like MySpace. Anyone remember MySpace? LOL
Popular now but will be a distant memory when the next big thing comes along.
That next BIG thing is here, didn’t you know? FB has twinned with BING (now that is BIG!). you can now do searched from within FB ……
umm is that unique hits or people visiting like 80 times a day at work ? I would like more data on what exactly this measured.
I love facebook , I do ! but would I click on any advertising from there ? Would I look for a service from there ?. Would I be willing to spend for Facebook and the answer is NO to all . yeah , facebook is great if its free and thats it. I see no value as a surfer for facebook other than talk to friends and catch up on whats going on. I do not think most people on there would even be interested in shopping on facebook . Unfortunately for facebook its just not sales friendly.
So the point is mute so what if facebook gets 100 times more traffic than google if it cannot convert that traffic to sales for itself or sponsors.
Hmmm! I guess the mute point is the one you are making, though I’d rather call it a moot point.
Now that Facebook (through oodle) are offering advertisements (be it free for now), is a case for “leverageable” opportunities. And though I use facebook and google regularly, I have NEVER based my decision on how my using either service would benefit their respective sponsors / advertisiers.
Things do work in cycles and I don’t believe it is a comparison that should be made as they are satisfying different needs of users.
After all, they perform entirely different functions.
As for the end for Google, I highly doubt it. For example, I’ve been waiting for Microsoft to wither up and blow away for years…
here is the way I see it. Its just like the Big Three, car companies, etc.
Look at how everyones life is changing.
facebook is addictive. Google is another.
My guess as to why Facebook exceeded Google’s number of visits during that time period may be due to the fact that Facebook e-mail notifications are set to notify you when someone has left a comment pertaining to a thread that you entered on Facebook or have replied to which engages the receiver and coaxes them to log back on to either post a reply or response. So let’s say a user posted a comment and got a reply which e-mails the user. He then logs back on to comment on the reply. Busy Facebook users could visit the site many times during the day whereas a typical internet surfer may only visit Google once a week to search for something. Considering there are other good search engines out there and that a web surfer wouldn’t necessarily go onto Google for their search query, that number (one a week visit to Google) may be very conservative. I’m a Realtor in Orlando, Florida. Orlando real estate is booming but no thanks to Google who apparently now places paid placement higher than organic results. Shame on Google for selling out. I used to use Google exclusively but I truly believe there are better search engines. Of course I won’t name names. Maybe Facebook should start their own search engine.
How many people out there have it as their starting page when they first open their Browser? This could account for much of the Traffic, people really are visiting the Social Media as part of their day, including me.
Google is the information hub, the index of indexes and has an answer for everything.. just ask em’. FB is for wasting time. FB will never replace Google. sorry.
This just tells us that the government needs to stop extending unemployment benefits.
I use google to search . Two months ago never used face book. TOday have hooked up with old high school and up friends. I thought it was a waste of time at first. In the end facebook will be connecting like mind people. Then it will be worth while. I think it will keep growing.
Facebook may not replace Google as a SEARCH engine, and I grant you that the two are different, but as another poster points out on this page, Google is NOT the only SE. In addition Google only indexes about 5 per cent or less of the entire WWW and while it may, for the moment be the best SE, it certainly isn’t a complete index of the web by any means.
Neither is it particularly intelligent as its search results often ( always ?? ) misinterpret the sense of words, where for example a word may have several meanings but one spelling – resulting in irrelevant search results. I don’t know whether it’s my imagination, but in my experience Google search results have got worse recently.
From an advertiser’s point of view, Google Adwords is very expensive and because it depends on keywords, potentially open to minsinterpretation if the keyword match is too broad for example. Such misinterpretation can result in a massive haemorrhage of advertiser’s cash on irrelevant search queries. Social network groups or even forums on the other hand, are by definition people with a shared interest, profession or pre-occupation and as such provide a ready made and well selected target for advertisers and since Adwords is Google’ main source of revenue social media advertising ( including FB ) is bound to make serious inroads into Google’ market share.
We can see which way the wind is blowing. Facebook and social media is the future of advertising. Google is the past
Web 3.0 will not just be about traffic and social media, it is also about great value added to internet users. If Google overthrew yahoo and MS through search traffic, Facebook might as well give a beautiful and visible expression to some intrinsic web values to internet users which Goog, Yahoo had ignored until now.
The truth is that with Facebook as the leader, Google and Yahoo are waking to catch up with it. Understandably the deployment of BING, BUZZ, and other recent introductions by these old giants are the belated expressions of that web race which they are gradually losing to Facebook.
My guess is that this is because Facebook is rather new, fresh and seems to work. And Google is ‘just’ embedded in peoples minds as ‘if I have to search the web, I use Google’.
Why would people be searching all the time? After a few years of internet experience people will probably have a list of bookmarks to the stores/services were they sucsesfully bought whatever product or got whatever service. And maybe because of this not every time start a new search for: DVD player
My last PC I bought at the same supplier as the one before. Did no search and went straight to the website of this supplier…this way Google is also losing terrain.
Could it be something like this?
I think this reinforces the trend towards community recommendation rather than search. Web users are beginning to see the benefit of having friends, family and colleagues suggest websites rather than searching themselves.
That in mind, I recently wrote an article about what I’ve called Combined Search Optmisation – the need to optimise your website to be found easily in some of the more popular social media websites, in addition to and in combination with SEO. Any comments welcomed:
http://www.great-seo.co.uk/combined-search-optimisation-search-engines/
Hey Sam,
Will read your article, it’s something that I think about a lot.
Ik am even thinking to push people (for who I create websites) to maintain a Facebook page when they have a website. This to influence the searchresults and so…
But problem I have with this is the fact that someones personal webpage will probably appear beneath the Facebook page(s) that appear in the sarchresults…I hate that.
The day a Facebook page appears above my own website when someone searches for my name I really get mad! It’s not fair…actually…
Ok, if Facebook is beating Google.. how do people go there? By Google.. so how can they beat Google?
A lot of ways to get to Facebook or other sites .I.E. Lycos,Ask ,Bing ,Yahoo, Wikipedia.And of course Google they all will get you there it is just that Google is probably the most used..
Who the heck uses Google to get to Facebook? That is so ridiculous to hear. Most people either have Facebook bookmarked or use a mobile app to access it without the need or assistance from Google. Only a web newbie would go to Google to find Facebook and that is not the norm today. Facebook is beating Google because they have pages that people want to be on, whereas Google is a sites for people to go to other pages.
Google doesn’t make any content, and only provides links to other websites so it was only a matter of time before another site would come along and have more appeal to keep people visiting their site more often.
There are 4 main search engines, and for the most part people can find what they are looking for from any of them, whereas there is only one Facebook and the contacts and interactions that go on there are exclusive to their site. This makes Facebook a destination that people want to go to, rather than a search engine that people use as a tool to find another site with.
I don’t ever hear people say yeah ‘I’m just surfing on Google, or checking out my contacts on Google, or I’m playing Farmville on Google”. Yet, all of these things happen on Facebook and bring visitors there daily to do these things.
The only thing Google is used for is to do a search to find another site, where people want to go to Facebook and they look forward to signing in there to get their updates and share things with others. Google is just a search engine that connects people to other sites, but Facebook is a social network that people want to go to.
You don’t need Google to get to Facebook and Facebook doesn’t aggregate nothing from Google, wheras Google aggregates content on Facebook to people within a social circle. This means that Google doesn’t have anything that Facebook wants, but Google wants what Facebook has.
The two entities vary in their mission, focus and paths. And for search, Google is more serious and Facebook “fools around too much” and we need our minds to be “fine online”
So I do hope that wonderful Facebook AND Google thrive alongside one another well, but not as competitors for anything but visits.
It’s great that FB has beat the Big G in visits. But when it comes to Revenue and Profits.
Google is the winner by far. In the business world that’s all that counts.
Once FB learns to how to properly monetize their business.
It will truly be a match for Google.
Although people spend more time on facebook, most people probably require Google more than facebook. I doubt facebook will ever become a leader in the search engine market, but Google with buzz might become a leader in social networking.
I would say Google was the ultimate in sticky…