Google Tops Most Visited Internet Sites For First Time
Anyone who wasn't already aware of what a huge behemoth Google has become in the world of the Internet need only look at the latest comScore list of the Top 50 most visited Web properties to learn the truth. It shows that Google sites are now the most visited places on the whole of the Internet, with 141 million unique visitors in the US during April 2008.
Google doesn't just consist of the search engine though, also owning YouTube, the massively popular market leader in Web video, which saw 4.3 billion videos watched during the month of March. There is also the Maps feature, which is increasingly being used around the world by people who need to know how to get somewhere quickly.
And lest we forget Google Mail, which came from nowhere when it first launched and just about took over the free Web-based mail market, with everyone seemingly having a GMail address now.
Yahoo!, the market leader before Google grabbed the top spot, came second this time around with 140 million unique visitors during April. Like Google this is down to the company owning many different facets of the Web, from a mail service, Yahoo News, which I find myself using as much as Google News these days, and Flickr, the photo sharing service which recently added the ability for videos to be uploaded to the site as well.
eBay comes in sixth, which is a surprise to me as there has been a lot of talk recently of the company taking a downward turn. It has recently had to contend with a sellers boycott over changes to the fees and security systems on the site, and it's thought that a lot of those traders have now moved on to other sites offering similar service at a much cheaper premium.
Wikipedia is in seventh, proving its worth in this time when Web 2.0 is all the rage, and any service offering one place with multiple streams of content and information is seen as worthy. I know from personal experience that when I encounter a phenomenon, be it a new band or book or whatever that I have never heard of, the first place I visit to find out more is Wikipedia.
The rest of the top 50 is made up of a diverse collection of Web destinations which goes to prove that the Internet is a commodity made up of sites which cater not only for what is popular, but also some very niche interests.
The bigger picture to these results, at least for me, is that we now all rely on the Internet to some extent for our day to day lives. I not only garner a lot of my information from it, I earn a living through it. Others use it purely for entertainment, while another set of people may use it to buy products saving them a trip down to the local mall.
As a recent episode of South Park showed, the world would go absolutely to pot if the Internet were to suddenly not be with us. It scares me to think about that prospect.