ComScore

One billion people worldwide visited Google in May, the first time ever that a site has drawn that many visitors in one month, according to data from ComScore.

The number of unique visitors to Google's sites rose by 8.4 percent from 931 million a year ago to just over a billion--1,009,699,000 to be more exact.

Across the world, market researcher ComScore said yesterday, Google saw its greatest numbers in India and South Africa, which accounted for 14.3 percent and 13.5 percent of its visitors, respectively. The lowest numbers were in South Korea and China, which accounted for 0.7 percent and 0.8 percent of total worldwide visitors, respectively.

Microsoft grabbed the No. 2 spot with 905 million visitors last month, up 15 percent from a year earlier, according to ComScore. Facebook took third place with 714 million visitors, up 30 percent since a year ago. Yahoo placed fourth with 689 million visitors, a 10.8 percent gain from a year earlier. Until last October, Yahoo had held the third spot, but since then Facebook has outpaced it each month with more visitors.

Though Google captured the most visitors last month, users collectively spent the most time at Facebook--250 billion minutes in May, compared with 200 billion minutes at Google and 204 billion at Microsoft.

ComScore's numbers are based on its "global measurement panel" of 2 million Internet users, according to The Wall Street Journal, which the research firm then refines with "page view" data that it receives from 90 of the 100 publishers of Web content, though not from Google.