Google has finally been knocked off its throne as the king of Internet destinations — at least temporarily. The San Jose Mercury News reports that for the week ending March 13, social media site Facebook surpassed Google for the first time in visitors in the United States. According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook accounted for 7.07 percent of all Web traffic during the week, compared to 7.03 percent for Google.
According to the numbers, Facebook added roughly 100 million users between September 2009 and February 2010 and now has 400 million active users.
“The key trend to think about here is people are spending more time talking to and interacting with each other,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at the Altimeter Group in San Mateo and author of the blog Web Strategy. “This does impact Google because people may be making decisions by listening and talking to each other rather than using traditional search avenues.”