FACEBOOK PASSES GOOGLE IN WEB TRAFFIC

For the first time Facebook has passed Google in web traffic according to Hitwise, an internet analysis and intelligence company. Hitwise says that last week, Facebook saw 3% more web visits and nearly five times as many pageviews as Google.com.

Facebook has been on track to outgrow Google for awhile now. The young social network has seen a 55% year-over-year increase in its traffic numbers. The only metric in which Google is now beating Facebook is in monthly uniques: Google counted 173.3 monthly uniques in October, compared to Facebook’s 151.13 million.

What these numbers make clear is that, for most people, Facebook now is the Internet… and that’s got Google, as well as privacy advocates, scared. Google understandably doesn’t want most of the Internet traffic locked behind Facebook’s login, unavailable for them to index and spit out ads upon, which is why they’ve started going to war with Facebook, denying users of the social network the ability to import their GMail contact data into the social network. [Geek]