No Fluke: Facebook Is Internet's Top Visited Site

Leslie Meredith, TechNewsDaily Senior Writer

15 March 2010 07:31 PM ET

Facebook surpassed Google to become the most visited Web site in the U.S. for a full week last week for the first time, according to the research firm Hitwise.

Facebook has only been able to attain the top spot on a handful of National holidays before, including Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and the weekend of March 6th and 7th this year, which was the long Presidents Day weekend.

Hitwise analysts noted Facebook's share of visits increased 185 percent last week compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google increased 9 percent during the same time frame.

One factor that may have led to Facebook's steady rise over the past several weeks was the Facebook redesign in February, which included relocating the search field to a far more prominent position.

Analytics firm comScore reported U.S. Facebook search queries grew by 10 percent last month to 436 million, up by 85 million over December's 351 million searches. The redesign also made chatting with friends, messages and notifications more noticeable.Online News Is Social Experience, More Popular than Newspaper

Facebook currently has more than 400 million active users. About half of these users visit daily and the average user spends close to an hour on the site each day. That's 11 billion minutes, up 27 percent in the past six months.

Together Facebook and Google accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.