New figures suggest that social networking is continuing to gain in popularity on the web, and that the way users search the internet is changing.

According to research firm Hitwise, Facebook.com now accounts for 7.07 per cent of all American web traffic, while Google.com is the destination for 7.04 per cent of traffic. Facebook has grown from 200m users in April 2009 to 400 million this February and is continuing to grow faster than Google.com. That means the social network’s lead is likely to increase in coming months.

The figures for Google.com, however, do not include national versions of the search engine, such as Google.co.uk, or figures for other Google services such as email, maps and YouTube. Of perhaps greater significance, however, is the fact that they do not include searches that come direct from browser search bars or from other websites. That means that, in daily experience, American users are continuing to search the web via Google far more than they are using Facebook because search is increasingly integrated into other sites and programmes.

Users spent an average of more than five and half hours on social networking sites in December 2009, which is an 82 per cent increase on the previous year, according to research from Nielsen. American users were typically an hour above that average.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/face...y-Facebook.html

Interesting figures... Yet not surprising... In addition to the fact that most facebook users are there to socialize and have fun, it is safe to say that its popularity has opened the eyes of all those of us doing business online.

yeah , just like you said articlewriter ,
it's fun and socialize more then just search as the case with google
that's why in my opinion it got beaten by facebook

Orkut has large number of users than Facebook.

This post has been edited by acdev: Apr 13 2010, 03:59 AM

Yeah I heard about this! That's just crazy to think that Facebook has passed Google! Facebook is also turning into a great marketing tool as well!

I never thought it would happen.

Only time will tell

This post has been edited by VictoriaDNP: Jul 20 2011, 01:11 AM

I laughed so hard from that animated .gif, dude. Nicely done!

Facebook is not even going to come close to what Google can do. check out their traffic differences



They don't even come close in traffic and even if Google fails through Google +, FB is still not going to come close to the earnings and worth of Google. There is even a huge chance that Google is going to beat that social network. lets see with Google + within the next few weeks.

I never search through Facebook, I use Google for all of my searches. So, Google has my vote.

Well, in terms of search, Google has most of the traffic for it, but for the social network, after a few weeks of GOogle plus being up, I don't think that there is that much threat yet for facebook.

Facebook may currently be the leader but I suspect that the new Google + will eventually outrank them. They have something in excess of 20million users already and their growth was exponential. They reached that figure in 24 days compared to Twitter and Facebook which took over 1000 days to reach that figure.

Interesting posting, but we really glade to say that Face Book is being beaten by Google+....!

Google+ is in very high competition with Facebook but it is very difficult to beat Facebook as it is the number one social networking site in the world.

Facebook is much more simplier as Google + also we have to keep in mind that facebook was the original ideia, it will be always more succesfull