In a possible sign of the sea change that social networking has brought to the Internet, new industry data show that U.S. visits to Facebook last week exceeded, for the first time, those to the former top site, Google. While the difference was relatively small for the week ending March 13 — 7.07 percent of all visits for Facebook, compared to 7.03 percent for Google — the trend could point to the growing strength of the social Internet.
This compares to a year ago, when Facebook visits were 2.48 percent of traffic in the U.S., compared to Google’s 6.46 percent. Taken together, the two sites now account for about one in every seven visits by Internet users.
Visits, Not Visitors
The report by industry watcher Hitwise measured visits, not visitors, meaning one visitor could go to Facebook, quit and return several times in a day for multiple visits. This could indicate that Facebook fans are returning more frequently than Google fans, or more visitors are going to Facebook — or both.
Hitwise’s report doesn’t count traffic to Google-owned sites such as Google Maps or YouTube, but only to the primary Google.com domain. Significantly, it also doesn’t measure searches through a Google box embedded into another site.
The neck-and-neck traffic race between the two sites is interesting for several reasons.
On one level, Facebook and Google have been competing in their social-networking platforms for which other sites and third-party developers can sign up — Facebook Connect versus Google Friend Connect. While Hitwise’s traffic data doesn’t reflect those platforms, it does show that the two web sites are in the best position to propagate social platforms.
On another level, Facebook’s phenomenal growth could be an indication of a shift in reasons why people in the U.S. and other countries use the web.
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Brad Shimmin, an…