Facebook saw search queries grow 10 percent in February 2010 and surpassed
Google in the United States
to become the most visited Website for the week ending March 13, according to
studies from leading market researchers.
Facebook.com recently reached the No. 1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas
Day and New Year's Day, as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th, according
to Hitwise analyst Heather Dougherty.
Visits to Facebook.com increased 185 percent last week as compared with the
same week in 2009. See the chart, which shows Facebook at 7.07 percent of
traffic to Google's 7.03 percent, here.
Meanwhile, comScore said search queries on Facebook grew from 395 million in
January 2010 to 436 million in February 2010, a growth of 10 percent. This pales
in comparison to Google's 13.4 billion queries for the same period, but search
on the leading social network site is spiking.
eWEEK asked Facebook if the company attributed this growth to the improved
Facebook search, along with the growth in Facebook to 400-million plus users
and their time spent on the site. A Facebook spokesperson told eWEEK:
"Facebook Search provides people with socially relevant search results
from the people they are connected to and the things they care about. As more
people join and connect on Facebook, we find that they turn to Facebook Search
as a way to surface content and information on things of interest to them,
whether it's the latest news, what people thought about a new movie release, a
specific hotel or even job openings."
People also look for this information on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing,
which means Facebook has become a genuine referral clearinghouse.
Indeed, take Hitwise analyst Dougherty's recent measure of location-based
social network Foursquare, which celebrated its one-year anniversary days ago.
Dougherty found that Facebook, not Google, accounted for the most traffic
to Foursquare.com.
Facebook accounted for 33 percent of the upstream visits last week. Google and
Twitter accounted for 22 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Forrester Research analyst Augie Ray noted that Facebook's search volume is
still awfully meager despite the fact consumers already "live" a
great deal of their online lives within the Facebook property.
"Instead, the challenge Facebook presents to Google is less related to
consumers' search activities and more related to discovery and traffic
generation," Ray said. Case in point: the aforementioned growth in traffic
to Foursquare from Facebook.
"Based on this trend, it's certainly possible that brand sites (which
drive a great deal of Google revenue through PPC ads) may shift budgets and decrease
emphasis on paying for traffic via search engines rather than earning traffic
through social media marketing means," Ray said.
Facebook is definitely becoming a fine referrer to other Web services, which
could actually end up helping Bing. Microsoft's search site is fortifying its integration with its social network partner.
Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling told eWEEK:
"If the new and improved integration of Bing into Facebook [forthcoming]
is really effective, then it could potentially peel away some query volume, but
that remains to be seen on several counts."
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