The increase of social networking sites has been able to gather a substantial amount of pace over the preceding years.

Facebook at present has more than 450 million users throughout the world.

And in the UK, social websites have just been able to reach another level of milestone. In May, more people paid a visit to social networking pages than they did to search engines.

This is according to figures that were compiled by Experian Hitwise. During the month of May, 11.88% of UK Internet visits were made to social networking sites. 11.33% were made to search engines.

Even though there is a trivial twist here, in that Hitwise counts, YouTube has been counted as a social networking site.

Facebook accounted for 55% of the UK's social networking action, and was the top placed site, but YouTube came second on the list, with 16%.

Without the YouTube statistics, the number of visits to social sites would yet be not more than the entire number of visits paid to the search engines. And it is debatable whether or not YouTube is a social networking site.

Although, YouTube does allow its users to share content with thief folks, yet, stating it as a social networking site would be too beyond the real definition of such a site.