Google becomes the most popular U.S. website

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Google is still king of search with a 67.9 per cent share, but the other Google-owned sites were not popular until now. According to comScore Inc.‘s rankings by the number of unique monthly visitors, Google is No.1.

Yahoo used to be more popular because of its e-mail and photo-sharing site flickr.com, but it grew only 7 per cent this year compared to the fast-rising Google, which grew 18 per cent compared to last year.

This is the first time Google has been ranked at the top for this category.

According to comScore, Google's unique U.S. audience in April was 141.1 million, an 18 percent increase from the same month in 2007. Yahoo's audience grew 7 percent, to 140.6 million. Microsoft Corp. was third at about 121 million.

One reason for Google’s surge could be due to the sudden popularity of iGoogle, a customizable website like Yahoo‘s welcome page, Pageflakes and Netvibes. iGoogle offers many applications you can see on one page.

Besides its popular services, YouTube and Gmail, more users are visiting other properties of Google such as Google Docs, Google Reader, Picasa, Google Finance and Google Maps, all of which are free.

Nielsen Online, another website-ranking company, named Google as the top Web brand.

Jack Flanagan, comScore's executive vice president, told MSNBC.com, "Google's dominance in search creates "a halo effect" that can boost its other services."

Though Yahoo lost its ranking, it still leads in pageviews, and its visitors spend more time on its sites to Google’s users. Yahoo has 33.6 billion pageviews compared to Google’s 28.7 billion pageviews per month.

The comScore data come from its Media Metrix panel, recruited primarily using random phone-based techniques.