Google surpasses Facebook as the most-visited site in 2011

Facebook may be dominating the social-networking space, but search giant Google surpassed Facebook as the most-visited web brand in the U.S in 2011, according to the recent report released by Nielson. In 2011, 153.4 million people in the U.S. visited Google sites per month, on average, from home and office computers. Facebook was the second most-visited U.S. web brand with 137, 644 million people visiting the site per month. Yahoo took the 3rd spot with 130,121 visitors on an average per month. Facebook continues to be the most popular social networking site though. Surprising, Google‘s Blogger saw more visitors than Twitter this year. According to the Nielson report, there were 45,712 visitors visiting Blogger per month in 2011, while Twitter saw only 23,574 visitors in a month. Google+, saw only 8,207 visitors, which clearly indicates that the site has a long way to go, before it can compete with the top players in the social networking space. Experian Hitwise has also published the list of most-visited sites and most-searched terms of the year, and according to its results, Facebook is the top-visited website in the U.S in 2011 surpassing Google. Facebook.com had 10.29 percent of visits, while Google.com had 7.70 percent of visits this year. However, if you consider all Google properties – YouTube, Blogger, Google+ etc, then the results of Experian match with that of Nielson and Google is found to be leading with 11.98 percent of all U.S. visits and Facebook properties account for 8.93 percent of the visits. The differences in the results of Nielson and Experian may also be due to the fact that companies conducted the study differently. While Nielsen focused on individual visitors per month, Experian Hitwise looked at total visits for the year. So, based on the above results we can say that Facebook and Google are dominating the web today and other web giants like Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Microsoft need to work hard in order to catch up with the two.