Google is more than a search company these days. The variety of other mobile, local, and media-centric sites with expanding popularity show Google as the chef with their finger in every single pie. For many industries, the amount of pie-grabbing is truly intense. More than half of the search market share pie, for example, is owned by Google (63.3 percent, according to the most recent comScore statistics), while Android is still the dominant player in the mobile market. But the overall picture is equally important for the company – especially as it acquires resources and loyalty to face the trials yet to come. Google certainly has no resource shortage when it comes to its current user base. The May 2011 comScore report shows that Google is the first company to reach one billion monthly unique visitors.
That statistic pulls from the global data on all of Google’s properties, and a large amount of the monthly unique visitors are going to YouTube. Further, while the billion mark was almost certainly passed, it is of note that it may have been passed previously or may have been narrowly missed; comScore, who estimated the figures, use a two million user panel to estimate results.
In any case, Google still owns the most popular set of properties on the web. Microsoft comes in second, at 905 million unique visitors, while Facebook, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia come in third, fourth, and fifth, respectively. Facebook, however, boasts the highest amount of time spent on the site. In a world where display advertisement and user interaction is becoming far more important, it may be that Facebook’s position is the most valuable – even though it falls nearly 30 percent short of Google’s total unique traffic base. Google is retaining its growth and search dominance, however, having posted an 8.4 percent increase from last year.
