14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has overthrown Google as the most visited website in the US according to data from Experian Hitwise. Facebook.com accounted for 8.93 percent of visits in the US from January through November. Google.com only got 7.19 percent of visits, quite a bit behind Facebook. Yahoo Mail came in third while Yahoo.com came in fourth.
"Facebook was the top-visited Website for the first time and accounted for 8.93 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010. Google.com ranked second with 7.19 percent of visits, followed by Yahoo! Mail (3.52 percent), Yahoo! (3.30 percent) and YouTube (2.65 percent)," Hitwise writes.
Youtube also makes a notable entrance at number five, and both MSN.com and Bing have grown in the past year. eBay.com fell out of the top 10, replaced by Bing and MySpace lost a couple of spots.
Note that in all cases, the stats are for single websites. Google's 7.19 percent is for www.google.com, the same with Yahoo, or Facebook for that matter.
This might look like a minor distinction, but it makes a great difference. Many studies focus on "Google sites" or "Microsoft" sites, grouping all properties under the same umbrella term.
When combining all online properties, both Google and Microsoft are significantly bigger than Facebook. The social network overtook Yahoo recently, but still has some catching up to do with the two web giants.
Of course, while Facebook may be spreading its vines all over the web, with the Like button, Facebook Connect, Instant Personalization and so on, it's still basically a single website with a single URL.
But Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all have many online products, some using the main domain, google.com, yahoo.com and so on, but some not. This is why mail.yahoo.com is listed separately from www.yahoo.com. Interestingly, in this case, Yahoo Mail is actually bigger than Yahoo.com in the US.
The fact that Facebook.com, as a single website, is now the biggest in the US should not be so surprising, considering that it relies a lot more on its main domain name than any of its competitors, even Google.