Facebook Was the Most Visited Website in the US in 2011, Trumping Google

Facebook was once again the most visited site by Americans, according to a report by Experian Hitwise. In fact, one in ten websites visits was to Facebook. Google came in second, expectantly, but it also snatched the third spot with YouTube.

"Facebook was the top-visited Website for the second year and accounted for 10.29 percentExperian Hitwise Top Ten Websites 2011 of all U.S. visits between January and November 2011 - a 15 percent increase from 2010," the report read.

"Google.com ranked second, with 7.70 percent of visits - a 7 percent increase - followed by YouTube (3.17 percent), Yahoo! Mail (2.95 percent) and Yahoo! (2.47 percent)," it said.

It must be noted that not all web analytics and research companies put Facebook on top. What's more, these numbers focus on visits rather than unique visitors, where Google should still reign.

But the fact that one in every ten websites visited was Facebook should be a very good indicator of just how much time people spend on the site and what a big chunk of the internet it has become.

"The combination of Google properties accounted for 11.98 percent of all U.S. visits - a 22 percent increase compared with 2010. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 6.81 percent," the report added.

Facebook's advantage, or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it, is that it's just one website. You can do plenty of stuff in it, video chat, rent movies, play games, upload photos, but it's still just one site.

Google on the other hand is a bit more spread out, plenty of its products live under the google.com domain, but some don't, including big ones like YouTube.

Another interesting stat from the report, even though the web is the ultimate level playing field, 32 percent of all US traffic in 2011 headed to the top 10 websites.