Google beats Facebook as 2011’s most visited site in US

Google has been the most visited site of 2011 in US, with Facebook coming a close second, a new study has revealed.

Google has been the most visited site of 2011 in US, with Facebook coming a close second, a new study has revealed.

The survey, conducted by Nielsen, suggests that more than 153 million visitors clicked onto Google branded pages each month, while Facebook attracted close to 138 million visitors.

As Yahoo came third with about 130 million visitors each month, analysts warned that the site's tally might be at risk if young people continued to turn away from web-based email, the BBC reported.

The study is based on data collected between January and October and included visits from home and work computers. It involved a sample from a global panel of 200,000 people.

Although Google trumped Facebook as the most popular web brand, it's Google+ network came far behind the social networking site in Nielsen's ranking of the most popular social networks and blogs.

Google+ came eighth in the list with 8.02m unique monthly visitors.

Google's YouTube was identified as the most popular destination for online videos, attracting more than three times the number of monthly visitors as the music video service Vevo.

The list, prepared by Nielsen, of the number of visitors to various websites is as follows -

1. Google 153,441,000

2. Facebook 137,644,000

3. Yahoo 130,121,000

4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing 115,890,000

5. YouTube 106,692,000

6. Microsoft 83,691,000

7. AOL Media Network 74,633,000

8. Wikipedia 62,097,000

9. Apple 61,608,000

10. Ask Search Network 60,552,000