Late last year, the tech world had a bit of a shock as everyone's favorite search engine was knocked off the top spot of the Earth's most popular website.
According to Cloudflare Radar's popularity ranking, the tech giant was knocked down to the second most popular domain by a surprise (relative) newcomer. No, despite Microsoft's crafty trick of making Bing the default search tool for the Edge browser (fun fact: the most popular search term typed into Bing is "Google") it did not manage to beat Google, and its ever-growing array of services including Maps, Translate, Photos, Flights, Books, and News.
Late last year, this is how rankings stood.
Top 10 most popular domains in late 2021
1) TikTok.com
2) Google.com
3) Facebook.com
4) Microsoft.com
5) Apple.com
6) Amazon.com
7) Netflix.com
8) YouTube.com
9) Twitter.com
10) WhatsApp.com
The popular video-sharing app TikTok first took the number 1 spot on February 17, 2021, but that lasted only for a day. However, from then on it started claiming a few more days in March, and a few more days in May. After August 10, the site was the most popular domain on most days.
The website surpassed Facebook as the Internet's favorite social media platform in terms of traffic, though Facebook remains the platform with the most users worldwide.
However, TikTok's dominance did not last long. New data from Cloudfare from the last 30 days has shown that Google is now consistently on top again as the world's most popular website.
Top 10 most popular domains in last 30 days
1) Google.com
2) TikTok.com
3) Facebook.com
4) Microsoft.com
5) Apple.com
6) Amazon.com
7) YouTube.com
8) Netflix.com
9) Instagram.com
10) Mozilla.org
In other developments, Twitter and WhatsApp have both slipped out of the top 10, with Instagram and Mozilla making an appearance instead. It should be noted that pornographic domains were excluded from the results, with other domain trackers showing adult websites in their own top 10s.