Google may not be the media darling it once was, having lost mindshare to social upstarts such as Facebook and Twitter in recent years, but when it comes to raw traffic the search giant is still top of the pile. Research firm ComScore estimates that last month Google’s family of web properties notched up one billion unique visitors – the first time an individual company has managed such traffic levels.
In second place was Microsoft with 905 million, and Facebook was in third with 714 million – up an impressive 30% since last year. Facebook’s numbers are particularly impressive given that all their visitors are on just Facebook.com, whereas Google’s audience are spread out over their many products and services (YouTube, GMail, Google News, Search, Maps etc.). Microsoft is in a similar situation, seeing their visitors split over Hotmail (which remains the biggest webmail service), Bing, which has seen heavy promotion in the US, as well as many other web properties.
In 2006 Google had 496,000 unique visitors per month, meaning the search giant has more than doubled their traffic in the last five years.
Facebook may be lagging behind the old web giants in terms of raw visitors, but in terms of time users spend on their sites, the popular social network is way out in front with 250 billion minutes of users’ time in May (that equates to around 680 days spent on Facebook every single hour) compared to Google’s 200 billion minutes, despite around 30% more traffic. Google is probably not doing itself any favours in this department, continually introducing tools to make searching and finding answers faster such as Google Instant, and more recently Instant Pages.
