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PALO ALTA, Calif. - When search engine giant Google seemed unbeatable in every way online, the rapid rise of the social networking site, Facebook actually surpassed its number of page views for a full week. Facebook became the most visited website in the U.S. last week. According to internet traffic tracker, Hitwise, Facebook recorded a massive 185 percent year-over-year increase in hits, taking more than seven percent chunk of all U.S. internet traffic for the week ending March 13.

Facebook had previously toppled Google on a daily basis, but never over an entire week's time.

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Taken together, Google and Facebook swallow up 14 percent of internet traffic in the United States. The Hitwise figure applies only to a side-by-side comparison of Facebook.com and Google.com and does not include Google's other properties such as Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube.

Winning over the web means turning those unique hits into ad revenue, something Google does better than anyone in the business. Efficiently monetizing their sites remains the next big hurdle for popular networking sites, such as Facebook.

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