Don’t Count Out Facebook as a Competitor to Google

In case you were wondering, Facebook is pretty popular. Google is of course the undisputed king of search market share, but Facebook has the edge in some areas. Social media is the obvious area.  While Google is hoping to make some serious headway here with Buzz, Facebook is far and away the dominant being in the world of social networks.

Compete shared some data with us that emphasizes just how big Facebook is, and just how seriously it should be taken. If these stats from Facebook weren't enough for you, Compete points out that Facebook has surpassed Yahoo as the #2 site online in the U.S. in terms of unique visitors, just under Google.

In December, according to Compete, Facebook's unique visitors in the U.S. had increased by over 121%. That's pretty incredible, because I seem to recall Facebook being pretty popular in late 2008 too.

In terms of social media sites, none of the others even come close in the U.S. - not even the world's second largest search engine, YouTube: 

So Facebook is already bigger than the second largest search engine. Add to that, the fact that search on Facebook itself is rising. According to comScore, Facebook's search query percentage increased by 13% from December to January, growing to 395 million searches:

Greg Sterling notes, the numbers in the chart "are likely internal searches on Facebook for content or friends, rather than web search. This is not the same thing as people conducting searches on Google, Yahoo or Bing more generally. And 13 percent growth is certainly strong, but not "phenomenal.'"

Facebook's search feature, which has been emphasized somewhat with the latest redesign, lets users search people, pages, groups, apps, events, posts by friends, posts by everyone, OR web results. Sterling makes the case that internal Facebook searches are different from web searches one would perform on Google, but in some ways, Facebook search simply goes places that Google doesn't (while also going Places that Google does via the Bing-powered web search).

Facebook is almost like its own web in some ways, and that is becoming truer all the time as Facebook gets more of users' time spent online (which it is doing through status updates, news, apps/games, videos, music, events, and possibly email in the future...we also suggest Facebook consider adding blogging to the mix).

Look at this newly released data from Nielsen about time spent online. In January (in the U.S.), Facebook users averaged 7 hours a month on the site. As a point of comparison, Google users spent about 2 hours.

In some ways, that doesn't really take anything away from Google, because Google's job as a search engine is to get you where you need to be to find what you're looking for. However, Facebook users appear to be finding plenty of stuff they are looking for along with stuff they didn't know they were looking for, as well as just hanging out and being entertained. With Facebook's search feature, they're able to find what they're looking for without having to leave Facebook until the search result (at least theoretically).

Whether you think Facebook's search growth is "phenomenal" or not, you can't overlook the fact that more people are using the search feature, and some unknown percentage of that is pulling from Bing. Maybe this should be construed as a good reason not to overlook your Bing SEO efforts. Maybe it's also another reason why Facebook should be viewed as one of Google's key competitors (along with Microsoft, Yahoo, and increasingly Apple).  Actually, Sterling points out that Google recently listed Facebook officially as a competitor for the first time in its annual 10K filing.

Google is seemingly going after the market that Facebook dominates with the launch of Google Buzz, but status updates are just part of the big picture. Search is just part of the big picture. It's all about getting the user's attention, is it not? Here are some tips for running a good Facebook page.

What do you think? Discuss here.

Facebook’s 2009 Scorecard Shows Huge Gains

Simply put, Facebook had a terrific 2009.  This afternoon, comScore provided some statistics that cover the entire year, and the easiest way to sum them up is by saying that double- or triple-digit growth occurred in an impressive eight out of ten categories.

According to comScore, the total number of unique visitors to Facebook increased 105 percent between December of 2008 and December of 2009, hitting 111.8 million before the new decade began.  At the same time, the number of average daily visitors increased by an even greater amount: 181 percent.

Meanwhile, the total minutes and total pages viewed stats rose 198 and 151 percent, respectively.  Average usage days per visitor hit 10.4 (up 37 percent), average minutes per visitor totaled 246.9 (up 45 percent), and average visits per visitor reached 27.4 (up 64 percent).  And total visits increased 236 percent.

The only sort of weak metrics were the average minutes per visit measurement (down 11 percent, probably due to people visiting the site so often), and the average minutes per usage day tally (up just 6 percent).

So Facebook's certainly starting 2010 in a much stronger position than it entered 2009.  And looking at the tail end of the line in comScore's graph, it doesn't appear that the social network's stats are going to plateau anytime soon.

Have You Read This?

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The Top 50 Sites in the US (as of November)

Compete puts together a monthly ranking of the top 250 Web sites in the US, based on unique visitors, and breaks up the data by relevant categories and behavioral segments. The firm is sharing the top 50.

"Despite continued concerns surrounding the economic recovery, holiday shoppers flocked to the Web in November," says Compete. "Of the 20 fastest growing Web categories last month, 13 were shopping related. November 2009 saw consumers shopping online for home and garden merchandise, searching for rebates and reading shopping blogs in record numbers."

Here are the top 50 Sites in terms of unique visitors:

Here are the top 20 gainers in terms of categories:

Here are the top 20 gainers in terms of traffic:

"If Web traffic is an accurate representation, Santa will be wrapping up a sleigh full of electronics this Christmas," says Compete. "In fact, 73.7 million consumers shopped for electronics in November, a 12 percent increase over 2008. Best Buy saw one of the month’s most dramatic Web site traffic increases – 74.6 percent month-over-month; the electronics retailer drew 29.5 million UVs to BestBuy.com. Gamestop.com (6.2 million UVs) and Newegg.com (5.9 million UVs) were also among the top gainers in November."

Unsurprisingly, bargain and coupon sites drew heavy traffic. It will be interesting to see how the lists shake out after the holiday season.

Have You Read This?

> The Top 50 Websites in the US

> Online Shoppers Have Bigger Holiday Budgets Than Offline Shoppers

> Compete Builds "Twitter Down" Case

 

Wolfram Alpha Open to Other Bing-Like Conversations

As I've noted in the past, Wolfram Alpha, the much-hyped search computation engine that was supposed to be the future of search hasn't exactly set the world on fire. As of November, Compete data indicates it was receiving under 300 thousand unique visitors in the US. To put that into perspective, Ask.com had over 41 million.

However, that's not to say that Wolfram Alpha is a failure. Not only is it still quite young, it is a much different animal than the average search engine, as has been discussed anytime Wolfram Alpha comes up in conversation. Those who search for the kind of results Wolfram Alpha offers seem generally impressed.

Microsoft recently launched some new features for its Bing search engine, and among those was the integration of some Wolfram Alpha data. Just like that, it seemed to dawn on the search industry that maybe this thing could indeed play a significant role in the future of search, perhaps not as a standalone engine (it's hard to get the average searcher to go to WolframAlpha.com), but maybe behind the scenes. Maybe the average person has no idea what Wolfram Alpha is, but if they use Bing, they may be using it anyway, and they may really like those results.

WebProNews recently interviewed Javed Panjwani, the Business Development Executive at Wolfram Alpha:

Among other things, Panjwani says that they look forward to more and more of those "kinds of conversations," as he talks about the engine's integration with Bing. We can only speculate, but does this mean they will pursue relationships with other search engines? Google perhaps?

I'm not trying to start any rumors about any possible deals or anything, but Wolfram Alpha's attitude seems quite open to such a thing. As Google likes to "organize the world's information," it's not hard to imagine them being able to use such a "computation engine." It could be at least as useful as the real-time results they're now indexing.

People have no doubt suggested the possibility of such a match-up in the past, particularly after the Bing deal was brought into the public eye. This could be something to keep an eye on. We've seen repeatedly now that Google does not want to be upstaged by Bing.


Have You Read This?

> Moving Beyond Google

> Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

> Wolfram Alpha Provides Financial Answers Based on Xignite Info

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