Facebook may have surpassed Google in the US, but what about other countries?
There was a significant amount of media attention earlier this week around a report from traffic monitoring company Hitwise that claimed Facebook now has more traffic than Google in the US.
First of all it’s worth noting that Hitwise only compared Facebook with Google Search… So Facebook didn’t really surpass Google, if you read the fine print. All of Google’s sites counted together (including sites like YouTube, Blogger, etc), would still crush Facebook in terms of sheer traffic.
Still, it’s an interesting trend to examine. Facebook has managed to amass users like no other social network before it. It’s like the Roman Empire of social networks, so how is it doing when it comes to conquering the world? And how is it doing compared to Google?
Facebook’s traffic rank in the top 20 countries
We made a list of the top 20 countries in terms of internet users, checking the traffic rank of Facebook for each one.
While we went through the data we also made sure to note what site was number one in each country, as well as the traffic rank of Google. We even threw in Twitter while we were at it, just because.
For the traffic rank, we used data from Alexa, not Hitwise, for the simple reason that Alexa data is readily available, including top lists for all countries. This means there will be some deviation from numbers reported by Hitwise. For example, Alexa still ranks Google.com as the number one site in the US, but it should still give us a decent indication of how these sites are doing.
| Country | Internet users | Facebook’s pos | Twitter’s pos | Google’s pos | Site at #1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| China | 360,000,000 | Not in top 500 | 371 | 3 | baidu.com |
| United States | 227,719,000 | 2 | 12 | 1 | google.com |
| Japan | 95,979,000 | 30 | 20 | 2 | yahoo.co.jp |
| India | 81,000,000 | 4 | 11 | 1 | google.co.in |
| Brazil | 67,510,400 | 16 | 18 | 1 | google.com.br |
| Germany | 54,229,325 | 3 | 11 | 1 | google.de |
| United Kingdom | 46,683,900 | 2 | 10 | 1 | google.co.uk |
| Russia | 45,250,000 | 20 | 40 | 4 | yandex.ru |
| France | 43,100,134 | 2 | 46 | 1 | google.fr |
| South Korea | 37,475,800 | 5 | 19 | 4 | naver.com |
| Iran | 32,200,000 | 58 | Not in top 500 | 1 | google.com |
| Italy | 30,026,400 | 2 | 30 | 1 | google.it |
| Indonesia | 30,000,000 | 1 | 12 | 2 | facebook.com |
| Spain | 29,093,984 | 2 | 19 | 1 | google.es |
| Mexico | 27,600,000 | 4 | 22 | 1 | google.com.mx |
| Turkey | 26,500,000 | 2 | 26 | 1 | google.com.tr |
| Canada | 25,086,000 | 2 | 11 | 1 | google.ca |
| Philippines | 24,000,000 | 1 | 10 | 3 | facebook.com |
| Vietnam | 21,963,117 | 8 | 192 | 1 | google.com.vn |
| Poland | 20,020,362 | 8 | 118 | 1 | google.pl |
| Worldwide | 1,733,993,741 | 2 | 12 | 1 | google.com |
Above: The top 20 countries in terms of internet users, plus worldwide results.
Facebook vs. Google, an uneven fight
A Google site is number one in 14 out the top 20 countries on the internet. Facebook is number one in two. Although Facebook’s rankings are mostly strong, they are still far behind Google.
And keep in mind that these listings don’t aggregate all Google sites. Google have their web properties spread out all over the place. For example, YouTube is the 4th most popular site in the world, and Blogger the 7th most popular, not to mention all the country-specific versions of Google. Facebook and Twitter, however, don’t suffer from the same division of their rankings.
One area Facebook seems to have conquered almost completely is Southeast Asia. Not only is it the most popular site in the Philippines and Indonesia, it’s also number one in Malaysia and Singapore (we checked). This region was the last stronghold of the social network site Friendster (remember them?), so this is probably bad news for Friendster.
Facebook vs. Twitter, another uneven fight
As we have pointed out in the past, while Twitter has been growing like crazy, they’re still not anywhere near the size of Facebook, and these country rankings confirm this from yet another perspective.
Japan is the exception, though. In Japan, Twitter is significantly more popular than Facebook. It’s the only country of the top 20 where Twitter beats Facebook, although they’re pretty close in Brazil as well.
Blocked sites…
Then there is another thing to consider here. This list includes two countries, China and Iran, which have made themselves known for either permanently or occasionally blocking access to social media sites, more specifically Twitter and Facebook. Their rankings in these two countries will therefore be pretty lousy, which of course isn’t entirely fair.
Conclusion
Even if Facebook got beaten by Google by a good margin in this survey, this is hardly a setback for them. The massive user base Facebook has gathered in just a few years is nothing short of amazing. Remember, they have only been around since 2004. Google, on the other hand, has had since 1998 to build their empire (and they are indeed huge).
Data sources: Alexa for the site traffic data, Internet World Stats for the internet users per country numbers.
The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.
As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.
Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h
Out of the 
Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff. 
jjss
March 19th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Intersting data. I didn’t think Yahoo would be in the top in any country.
Daniel - TimeCenter Scheduling Software
March 20th, 2010 at 3:19 am
And our dear country Sweden:
6,981,200 Internet users
Facebook 2
Twitter 17
Google 1
None of my Swedish friends use Twitter, so I am suprised that it ranked that high. Interesting. Maybe it’s going up?
Tina
March 20th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
Google should not give up China. Facebook is not allowed there. That can be an ace for google.
Grant
March 23rd, 2010 at 11:35 pm
The original report looked at ‘market share of visits’, so Alexa data (as you point out) will be different. From what I understand, Alexa logs data from people using its toolbar; which is going to skew the data towards those people who install toolbars (onto supported Windows browsers).
Twitter will be much lower by Alexa measures, as many Twitter users such as myself don’t visit Twitter.com website; instead sending/receiving tweets from various bits of software and/or phones. If you are looking at traffic then of course Twitter will also be much lower as they are mainly doing small amounts of text rather than lots of graphics and games such as on Facebook. Considering that (and how new Twitter is), the ranking is the biggest surprise to me.
So I think depending on the metrics, Twitter and Facebook are hugely popular, but its a safe assumption that Google beats all worldwide. Numbers of active users using accounts would be a key metric; I am picking that Twitter might overhaul Google (Gmail) and Facebook on this measure if not already.
What is also surprising to me is how quickly Facebook defeated all the other social networking sites like Bebo, Myspace and the others. Getting a critical mass of users is vital for these sites or people will quickly migrate.
biro jodoh
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:56 am
No, I don’t think facebook is gonna surpassed google, but “I THINK” twitter gonna surpassed facebook in the matter of time, if facebook doesn’t add more application in next few months, it’ll be gone.
@Tina No, google doesn’t give up china, china doesn’t want google because they believe they baidu is stronger.
PS: no politics
Adrianne
September 6th, 2010 at 10:50 am
People here in the Philippines are so hooked and addicted to facebook. Specially, those teenagers. Most of them spend more of their time on facebook than spending their time doing homeworks.