It is no surprise that the title of most visited website was owned by Google for quite some time.  The search engine is the most popular on the web and millions upon millions of internet users visit the site daily to find answers.  In 2010, a surprising shift occurred and it became obvious that Google’s dominance could not last forever.

On this day, March 15th, in 2010, the web tracking firm Hitwise announced that Facebook.com had surpassed Google to be the most visited website in the world during the prior week. For the week of March 13, 2010, Facebook held a 7.07% market share of internet traffic, while Google only reached 7.03%.   It is obvious that the overtaking of Google as most visited website for a week is impressive, but the feat is made even more notable when it is considered that Facebook held less than a 3% share a year prior.

To many, the announcement by Hitwise marked a greater trend in the internet of the time; the internet is becoming more social than information focused.  Facebook has only increased its visitors since overtaking Google in 2010 and now boasts more than 845 million users worldwide.  Although the end of 2011 showed that Google was still the top visited site overall, Facebook is a formidable challenger, as was seen on March 15, 2010,.