In a sign the web is becoming more sociable than searchable, research firm Hitwise said the two sites accounted for 14 per cent of all US internet visits last week. Facebook’s home page recorded 7.07 per cent of traffic and Google’s 7.03 per cent.
It is the first time Facebook has enjoyed a weekly lead over Google.
The lead may be slim, but it has become inevitable as Facebook’s popularity has grown rapidly from just over 2 per cent of visits a year ago. Heather Dougherty of Hitwise said Facebook had “reached an important milestone” with the weekly figures. It had hit the daily number one spot on Christmas eve, Christmas day and New Year’s day previously.
Facebook’s rise has been impressive. Its membership has more than doubled in the past year, passing the 200m mark last April and 400m in February.
Google has responded to the ascendancy of the social networking site with the introduction of its own Buzz service last month. Buzz allows users to add status updates, friends, pictures, videos, location information, comments and links to other networking sites.
Buzz, though, has struggled with privacy concerns just as Facebook has encountered criticism for encouraging members to reveal more of their personal data to search engines that seek real-time information about their interests.
The Hitwise figures only cover visits to the Google.com site, meaning that services such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps and searches carried out in a box in a browser toolbar are excluded.
Taking all Google properties into account, the internet company accounted for 11.03 per cent of US website visits last week among the top 100 domains, compared with 10.98 per cent for Yahoo properties and 7.07 per cent for Facebook, according to Hitwise.
Facebook’s trajectory suggests it will soar ahead of Google.com in the coming months. However, social networking sites have fallen back in the past. Google.com had led since September 2007, when it overtook News Corp’s MySpace.com.
Internet users worldwide spent more than five and half hours a month on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82 per cent increase over the previous year, according to the Nielsen Company research firm.
US users spent nearly six-and-a-half hours on Facebook compared with fewer than two-and-a-half hours on Google.
