Facebook beats Google in US for first time
(AFP) – 6 hours ago
SAN FRANCISCO — Social-networking star Facebook surpassed Google to
become the most visited website in the United States for the first
time last week, industry analysts showed.
Facebook's homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most
visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.
The "important milestone," as described by Hitwise director of
research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185
percent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same
week in 2009.
By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only
nine percent in the same time -- although the tracker does not include
Google property sites such as the popular Gmail email service, YouTube
and Google Maps.
Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 percent of
the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.
Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook
and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking
feature Buzz to its Gmail service.
In what could signal an escalating battle between Facebook and Google,
the leading social-networking service celebrated its sixth birthday
earlier this year with changes including a new message inbox that
echoes Gmail's format.
Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million
unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.
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