Google has been around for a little over a decade now, and facebook a little over 6 years (tx jackowayed). Both of these companies have steady growth and seem to find a permanent spot in the lives of the people using them. I think it’s fair to say that plenty of people can’t imagine going through their (work) day without using a google product, either search, gmail, maps, news or youtube. Facebook has become the most successful social networking site ever. It has seen some pretty amazing growth and I periodically compare the two to see how they’re doing relative to each other. I was wondering if - and when - facebook will ever take the top spot away from google.
There are several public sites where you can check out how one website is doing relative to another. On alexa.com google is steadily the #1 website and facebook seems to have lodged itself permanently in the second position. If you do a comparison of the two sites you get a little graph that suggests that at some point in the future facebook will - barring unforeseen events - overtake google. Just how long is hard to read from the graph, so I’ve extrapolated the trendlines a bit to the right of where we are now, and according to the alexa graph it will be somewhere in the first quarter of 2012 that facebook will take the #1 spot, making it the most visited website on a daily basis. If those trends continue over 50% of the internet users will be visiting either site on a daily basis!
Another service called ‘compete’ shows a similar result, only in that case the crossover date is even closer, Q1 2011:
The sampling method both companies use is quite different, so it is not surprising that there would be a discrepancy between the two graphs, but I think it is quite telling that both of them show facebook growing significantly faster than google and that both of them show facebook taking the top spot within the next 18 months, so I think it is fairly safe to make that prediction.