The New Leader is…

Posted on May 19, 2008

Google has passed Yahoo to become the most popular Web site in the US, according to rankings by the number of unique visitors on a monthly basis.

Google Inc. has been the leader in searches for some time, but has been behind Yahoo when counting other services such as e-mail and photo sharing.

The numbers from April show Google on top for the first time - but not by much. They just eked out a lead but it was for the first time so that makes it significant as it just one more hint of Google’s dominance.

Google now has Picasa which competes with Yahoo’s Flickr. Google also has launched a site on finance, while its Gmail e-mail service keeps growing - and all of this competes with Yahoo. Plus the purchase of YouTube by Google gave it the leading video-sharing website.

Google enjoyed an 18 percent increase from a year ago while Yahoo’s visitors grew 7 percent and Microsoft Corp. was somewhat less.

However, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often, but that may be because Google finds more relevant answers to the terms searched for and the users move on to the results while on Yahoo they may have to search longer to find what they are looking for.

Google continues to not surprise because they are now expected year-over-year to gobble up more of the visitors to the web by offering a growing palette of services.