Updated on Friday, December 22, 2006, 00:00 IST

San Francisco, Dec 22: Google overtook Yahoo as the second most popular internet destination for web surfers worldwide in November while Microsoft held on to the top spot, Comscore has reported.

Slightly more than 736 million people around the world traveled the internet last month, with 475,713 of them visiting Google websites and 475,262 going to Yahoo Online Properties, according to industry tracker Comscore.

Websites of Redmond, Washington-based software giant Microsoft were visited by 501,720 people, the rating tally revealed.

Hot video-sharing website Youtube placed tenth in the Comscore media metrix rankings but showed the largest surge in visitors, with the number catapulting by more than 2,000 per cent to 107,944.

Google's results did not include visits to Youtube, which it bought in October.

The popularity of Google websites was up 9 per cent from the same month a year earlier, while visits to Silicon Valley rival Yahoo grew by 5 per cent and to Microsoft by 3 per cent in the same comparison.

Online auction pioneer Ebay was ranked in fourth place, with the number of visitors slipping by one per cent from November of 2005 to 250,848. Time Warner network site visits also notched down one per cent, tallying 222,107.

The number of people going to the communally-edited internet encyclopedia site Wikipedia more than doubled to 171,945 in November as compared to that month last year.

Bureau Report