In today’s society, it is nearly impossible to imagine life without the internet, let alone computers. In fact, we at NetGuide have to confess that for most of us, not a day goes by without countless visits to Google and Facebook. And to think that less than a decade ago, Facebook did not exist and Google was competing against a sea of other (more popular) search engines! This got us thinking: which of these two insanely popular sites do we rely on more and which would we rather give up if we were forced to choose between them? Obviously neither Facebook nor Google will be going anywhere any time soon, but just for fun; here is some food for thought.FACEBOOK:

• Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
• The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but eventually expanded to include other Ivey League colleges and finally was opened up to anyone above 13 years of age.
• In January 2009, Facebook beat out MySpace to win the title of ‘most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users’ and Entertainment Weekly mused, "how on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”
• In October 2010, ‘The Social Network’, a film about the making of Facebook was released.
• As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users.

GOOGLE:

• Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford, who were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project.
• The name "Google” originated from a misspelling of "googol,” which refers to the very large number 10100 (in other words, the number 1 followed by one-hundred zeros.)
• By early 2004, more than 84.7% of web searches were handled by Google through its website and its partnerships with other Internet clients like Yahoo!, AOL and CNN.
• In 2006, the verb "google” was officially added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.

THE VERDICT:Although we love Facebook, our pick would have to be Google for the sole reason that it can do almost everything we ask of it – including all of the things that Facebook still can’t. Finding information the old fashioned way (like visiting the library, for example) seems far too much effort now that we’ve become so well acquainted with Google. Plus we’d like to think that when it comes to socializing, the real thing still has Facebook beat! (For now...)