Facebook beats Google… Sort of

It does sound quite far-fetched, but according to recent figures the Facebook homepage has become more popular than its Google counterpart with US users. These latest figures validate the idea that Social Networking is becoming a real powerhouse in the online world, it also shows that the way in which certain users search the internet may be changing.

Does this mean that people have now become more interested in checking Facebook and seeing what their ‘friends’ are doing then searching for, well….. anything else?

At first glance this would appear to be true, research company Hitwise released results showing that Facebook is accounting for 7.07% of all web traffic in the United States where as Google is accounting for 7.04%. Despite the fact that Facebook has had a 100% growth from April 2009 to February 2010 (200m users jumped to 400m in this time) this still seems quite a surprising statistic considering the sheer magnitude of Google’s presence on the web, it suggests that Facebook is somehow growing faster than Google.

If we look a bit closer at the statistics it is possible to see why they have been a tad deceiving. The figures only show the usage of Google in the US, they do not include international versions such as Google.co.uk and it does not include the other services that they provide such as Google Maps or G-mail. And just as importantly the figures do not show searches that come from web browser search bars or from Google integrated sites.

So in actuality US users are using Google more than they use Facebook, but one thing that is abundantly clear from these results is that Facebook and social networking is growing at an incredible rate and it wont be long before it really is challenging Google for web rankings.

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