According to a recent article on Mashable, Facebook has reached the top volume ranking in the United States. Hitwise, the data analytics service from Experian, has found that social networks in general are more popular than search engines in some parts of the world, and that Facebook has now surpassed Google to become the most visited website:

“Facebook recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook and Google accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week [the week ending March 7th, 2010].”

In fact, according to Mashable, networks such as Facebook been pushing hard against the biggest names in web search including Google for several months: “Now, we’ve learned that in the UK, people are visiting social networks more than they’re visiting search engines. Facebook dominates the current crop of social networks, accounting for the majority (55%) of all social site visits. When compared to the wider web, Google gets around 9.3% of all web traffic, while Facebook now captures over 7%.”

And, global page view trends for Facebook and Google show that “while social networks such as Facebook don’t pose an immediate threat to search engines for their core functionality, they do pose a large threat to search engines’ largest revenue source, advertising.”

Click Here to read the entire article on Mashable.

Tags: advertising, ndg communications, ndg companies, search, socialmedia, trends