'US internet users spend more time on Facebook than Google'

BOSTON: American internet users are spending more time on social networking site Facebook than searching on Google, a market research company said in a report.

US web surfers spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, about 9.9 per cent of their web-surfing minutes for the month, according to new data from comScore Inc.

In comparison, they spent 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 per cent of their web surfing time, on all of Google Inc.'s sites combined, including YouTube, Gmail and Google news.

The web users spent 37.7 million minutes on Yahoo Inc sites, or 9.1 percent of their time. In July, Facebook crept past Yahoo for the first time, according to comScore.

In August last year, web surfers had spent less than 5 per cent of their online time on Facebook, about the same percentage of their time on Google and almost 12 per cent on Yahoo.

In August 2007, Facebook captured less than 2 per cent of US surfers' total minutes. Google accounted for less than 4 percent, and Yahoo just over 12 per cent.

Both Facebook and Google have received considerably more traffic over the last year, climbing from the around five per cent each in August 2009. Many key brands are using Facebook pages as their main online destinations, it said.

comScore bases the estimates on a combination of reports from a panel of two million users around the world and data from websites' servers.