subject: Is Facebook Getting Bigger Than Google? [print this page] According to the analysts at Hitwise, social networks in general are more popular than search engines in some parts of the world.
In fact, networks such as Facebook have been pushing hard against the biggest names in web search, including Google, for several months now. As Hitwise reported recently, Facebook's overall web traffic pulled ahead of Google's for the first time in the U.S. in March of this year.
Now, we've learned that in the UK, people are visiting social networks more than they're visiting search engines. Facebook dominates the current crop of social networks, accounting for the majority (55%) of all social site visits. When compared to the wider web, Google gets around 9.3% of all web traffic, while Facebook captures just over 7%. You may think that Facebook is not surpassing, right?
If all data from every search engine and social site is added up, traffic of social networks is actually .55% higher than that of search engines. This is phenomenal and likely to go on and on.
Just make a comparison using Alexa's long-term statistics and that graph, one will notice Facebook is growing fast. You may have learnt through the history of Facebook - very fast, no, super fast, like a rocket.
Although social networks like Facebook may not threaten the status of search engines as web organizers which help people search information online, they compete with search engines in the advertising business. But you may see that advertisers now are watching at Facebook for its huge amount of users and potential to do business. Starbucks is representative of using its official page for business. Websites are more often informative.
Imagine being Google, would this trend get on your nerve? Are you worried about the apparent falling of search engine?
Or is Facebook's meteoric rise simply changing the paradigm a bit more than we expected?
