Facebook Surpassed Google as the Number One WebSite for this week’s Traffic

According to Web analysis firm Experian Hitwise, Facebook, the social networking site,  ranked number one as the most visited website beating Google for the week ending Mar 13. Facebook registered 7.07 % web traffic last week and the web traffic stands at 7.03% for Google last week. The study only made comparison between domain names facebook.com and Google.com. The number of visitors for Facebook shot up to 185% compared to the same period last year, whereas the number of visitors for Google went up to meager 9% for the same time period. Google continuously ranked number one since Sept. 15, 2007.

“It shows content sharing has become a huge driving force online,” said Matt Tatham, director of media relations at Hitwise. “People want information from friends they trust, versus the the anonymity of a search engine.”

Tatham said that it is obviously very good news for Google. Facebook has never beaten Google for the whole week. Although, it accounted the most visited website during Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year day. Facebook also topped Google for the weekend traffic March 6-7. Tatham further commented  if he considers all Google owned companies like YouTube or Gmail, the web traffic stands at 11.03%, ie number one position. While Yahoo registered number two position with second most visited web site with traffic at 10.98%. MySpace dominated in web site traffic for a long period of time until traffic has started to drop because of the rise of Facebook.