Facebook Surpasses Google in Domestic Website Visits for September 2010

Facebook.com which is presently the #2 ranked internet domain in the world behind Google.com (GOOG) according to Alexa.com site rankings, just surpassed Google.com in the number of Website visits from within the USA according to data just released by Compete.com. Compete.com estimates that Americans visited Facebook.com approximately 3.43 billion times during the month of September compared to 3.21 billion visits to Google.com in the same month.

These data further highlight Facebook’s meteoric rise to become the #2 ranked internet property on the web over the last few years. It was only three years ago when Facebook was ranked lower than its social networking competitor MySpace.com, but things have certainly changed over the last 3 years, and while MySpace has definitely lost market share, Facebook seems unstoppable in its quest for more users and web-traffic.

If and when Facebook will eclipse Google to become the most popular website on the internet still remains to be seen, but if the trend in the chart below continues, then it is only a matter of time. What does this mean for Google’s stock and Facebook’s private placement stock which trades on Sharespost.com?

US Job Website Visits by Month

The number of unique visits to US job websites has been on a steady rise over the last few months, but it is still well off of the highs that it reached last year. In August 2010, US job sites had about 130 million unique visits which represented a 1.7% increase over July 2010, but still well below the highs of 170 million visits per month which was seen throughout 2009.

The data in the chart below come from Compete.com, which is a website analytics platform, and are an aggregate of views to careerbuilder.com, hotjobs.yahoo.com, indeed.com, and monster.com.  Could these data be a sign that the job market is beginning to tighten again? Or does it simply mean that people were so discouraged that they stopped looking for a job at the beginning of the year, and now they are beginning to look again? The monthly jobs numbers should let us know soon.

Top Semiconductor Stocks by Dividend Yield

Semiconductor stocks were on fire on Friday. Is this the beginning of a big rally for the sector or a dead cat bounce after the sector fell hard after Intel’s announcement to buy McAfee? The yield on many of these stocks has become really high so perhaps this rally in the semis could have legs.

I ran a screen and here is the list of the top semiconductor stocks by dividend yield.