Google Nets a Billion Visitors in May

A new record for unique users in a month has been set, with Facebook and Microsoft closing in on the benchmark, too.

More than a billion people visited Google or one of its sites in May, making the search engine giant the first web company in the world to pass that mark. The estimate comes from ComScore, which measures the number of unique users visiting a site. Microsoft's websites, notably MSN and Hotmail, netted just over 900 million, while Facebook reached 714 million different people in May. The growth in Google's numbers – an 8.4 per cent increase in users from the previous year – has been helped by more people accessing Gmail and the ever-popular video service, YouTube. All told, users spent 204 billion minutes on Google sites in May, equal to 387,870 years.