ReadWriteWeb

Social networking behemoth Facebook reached 1 trillion pageviews in June, according to new data. Facebook is the most-visited website on the Internet, according to data compiled by the ad network DoubleClick, a subsidiary of Google.

In June 2011, Facebook received about 870 million unique visitors, a figure that exceeds the number of registered users the site has by about 120 million. That's because many of the site's pages come up in search results and are generally visible to non-users, if only partially.

The word "best" is included in 277 million searches a month, according to the Google AdWords keyword tool. So a search engine that could tell you what the best stuff is would be pretty handy, right?

Doubleclick co-founder Kevin O'Connor thought so too. The idea was enough to bring him out of retirement (read: surfing) to start FindTheBest.com. But how do you build an engine that can answer the variety of "best" queries from "best pizza," and "Best Picture" to "best time of the year to visit Portland"?

An internal Google memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal outlines the company's "vision statement" for monetizing its vast stores of data over the long term.

The document talks about major profit sources like data and advertising exchanges. But it also includes some "wacky examples" of ways to make money from everyday users that its authors promise will be the subject of "future brainstorming sessions."

Google knows you. It knows what type of car you drive from that time, last year, when you looked up the where you could find a cheap set of tires. It knows that you like Mexican food from all the times you've looked on Google Maps. And Google knows how to leverage this type of information with services like Google AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange but now it's moving into what it's calling "the next generation of ad serving" - a simplified, streamlined ad server.

While Google currently has the upper hand in the battle, it's starting to look more and more like Google and Facebook are about to duke it out in the advertising arena. And who will they be battling over? The little guy.

It's called a spoiler tactic. You take your competitor's biggest cash cow and offer a free alternative. Everybody from Linux to Google has used the tactic against Microsoft. So who can fault Microsoft when it uses it against Google's advertising cash cow? The guys who benefit from this tactic today are the good folks at OpenX, the open-source alternative to ad servers from Google such as DoubleClick (for big publishers) and AdManager (for small publishers). (Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb uses OpenX to host our advertising inventory.)

Of course, ad-serving itself is not really the cash cow, but it is a key part of it. The real prize is a viable alternative to AdSense. This is the background of today's news about OpenX and Microsoft announcing an advertising technology partnership.

Google's search advertising is the best cash cow ever invented for the Internet. None of the well funded alternative search engine contenders are able to put a dent into that dominance. But all of Google's other experimentation, all that frenzied innovation from their assembled brains trust, seems to be hitting headwinds. A tiny Indian company called Zoho is giving them a run for their money in Web Office and the latest report indicates that Knol is not even making a dent into Wikipedia. YouTube monetization is also hitting hurdles. We look at why all of this should matter to Google.