Even the Mighty Casey struck out and Google may be the next to fall from being the most visited site on the internet. Since March 2010, Facebook has gained a ton of ground on the King and is currently less than 10% less in unique visitors daily according to Compete.com.
Facebook is currently the second most popular website behind Google and considering Google made its debut in 1997 whereas Facebook launched in 2004, it’s remarkable how much popularity Facebook has gained in such a short time.
The other factor to weigh in is that most Facebook users spend more time on site (Approx. 30 minutes) than those users who visit Google (Approx. 10 minutes). The biggest concern for Google is that Facebook seems to be moving into the search arena or at least it looks that way after making a deal with Microsoft last fall to add results from its network to the Bing search engine. The new startup Blekko also has a search that includes social results based on Facebook “likes” and other activity.
Google could fall from #1 by the end of 2011 and that didn’t seem possible a few years ago. Though Google has expanded its business into other technology areas, I don’t think that Facebook will have a negative effect on Google’s earnings or continued growth.
Web analytics are based on unique visitors and were obtained from Compete.com and Alexa.com. Both services provide approximate statistics and shouldn’t be considered as 100 percent accurate.
About Blekko: Blekko is a search engine that serves up relevant search queries from trusted web sites and excluding material from such sites as content farms from its index.
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Only time will tell. Google is a great search engine so it will be interesting to watch the progress.
If Facebook can grow into a powerful search competitor to Google, then it will greatly benefit us webmasters, as it would help minimize traffic fluctuations during algorithm changes by being less dependent on one major source of visitors. I hope this happens.
It will definitely benefit to all users. Simply because google has been so prominent for years they became rather arrogant in their ways of doing thing and dealing with webmasters!
John,
Google will still be the top dog even when Facebook dethrones their number one ranking.
Google is loosing the “top dog” status in many ways already and give it another couple of years i think they will have to change and adapt.
Thank you for this post! I was searching for the right topic for my upcoming thesis until I came across this post. You gave me a great idea, I just had to let you know.
Thank you
I’m sticking with Google I may be a member of Facebook but Google is in my opinion a great search engine and far superior to Yahoo whom I dislike.
Chrome is a great web browser as well and I often use it and if Firefox keeps crashing and altering their browser ( hardly any adons work with Firefox 4) it won’t be long before Chrome will be my default.
I wish they had an operating system personally