By Erik Qualman
The week of SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin is an appropriate time for data to show that Facebook has overtaken Google in U.S. Market Share according to recent data from Hitwise.
Facebook surpassess Google in traffic in the U.S. according to Hitwise
While I’ve often said that Google views Social Media as their top competition, this rapid ascent by Facebook is astounding.
Facebook surpassed the previous most popular site, Google, in terms of overall traffic for the week in the U.S. Globally Facebook has 450 million users and would be the third largest country in the world behind China and India.
There is a great post on Digital Beat by Devindra Hardawar that goes into more detail:
+ Facebook 7.07% U.S. web traffic vs. Google 7.03%
+ Facebook traffic +185% vs. Google 9%
+ Comscore still ranks Google ahead of Facebook
+ TechCrunch still ranks Facebook behind Google, Yahoo and MSFT
Socialnomics - Social Media, Mobile, Digital Blog 
I think that facebook is better because everyone uses facebook and hardly anyone use google to search.
facebook.com boooooooooooooooooooooooooooiiiiiiiiiiii
I think facebook is better because its more of a website to talk to all your old friends from a long time ago.
I think facebook is better than google because you can do more fun things on facebook than google . And if you need to talk to someone for an emergency . You can talk to them on facebook not google
I think Facebook is better because all of my friends say its cool and i dont really use google for anything unless i look up something for my mom.
If only all the ´wars´ could be so dam goods as this..!!!
Since the beginning of the times, this battle is one of the most productives struggles for mankind…!!!! PLEASE…go on…!!!
These stats don’t tell the whole truth though. They miss out a significant part of googles searches through youtube. Still interesting.
The answer may come down to games. If Facebook gaming continues to grow, so will its traffic. Even more important than the sheer number of hits may be the time spent on the site. Google moves people through to other sites quickly. Facebook tends to keep visitors much longer and show them a lot of ads.
Richard:
Great point on Facebook games (wow they have a lot of revenue streams). Well said on the sticky nature of Facebook too! Thanks for the great input.
Have a great weekend…I’m going to be in a basketball coma.
Google shouldn’t try to compete with Social Media, it should try to be a part of it. Buzz was an attempt, but not good enough. In the future Facebook will continue to grow as Google tries to beat it. Don’t fight them google, join them!!
That might be the better strategy. Zuckerberg has made it clear by not allowing anyone to buy him out that Facebook is going for the top slot!