Another milestone for the social networking dynamo: Facebook has eclipsed Google as the Web destination where U.S. surfers spend most of their time, according to web traffic researcher ComScore.
Time spent by U.S. web surfers on Facebook has nearly doubled since last year, to the point where Facebook accounted for 9.9 percent of users' total web surfing minutes for the month of August. That 9.9 percent is slightly more than the 9.6 percent of surfers' web minutes used for Google and its various sites and services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google News.
ComScore bases its data on reports from about 2 million web users around the world, plus data on Web site traffic from servers. In a new report, released Thursday, it described U.S. web surfers as spending a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, more than the 39.8 million minutes they spent using Google services.
Behind Facebook and Google, users spent 37.7 million minutes -- or about 9.1 percent of their overall surfing time -- on Yahoo.com and Yahoo-related sites and services.
In contrast, according to ComScore, Facebook accounted for less than 5 percent of users' online minutes in August 2009, and three years ago, in August 2007, it was less than 2 percent.
Facebook as of July 2010 had about 500 million active users worldwide.
