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 second most-visited website was YouTube, which had 790 million unique visitors in June and 100 million pageviews.

The data released by DoubleClick does not include adult websites, ad networks and certain sites owned by Google.

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"?

FindTheBest is more of a decision engine than a search engine. "FindTheBest will remove the crap so you just have the distilled relevant data for you to make a more informed decision," O'Connor says.

O'Connor co-founded DoubleClick, the advertising network that was eventually acquired by Google for $3.1 billion, as well as Intercomputer Communications Corporation, which hit $35m in annual revenue, and was the first investor in Internet Security Systems, which sold to IBM for 1.4 billion.

How it works - manpower

So someone is looking for, say, the best James Bond movie. Or the oldest James Bond movie or the highest-grossing James Bond movie. That user may not have heard of FindTheBest.com. But hopefully, by some combinations of keywords, the user ends up at the James Bond app on FindTheBest.com. Here, all the top information about James Bond movies is arranged in an easy-to-digest table, or "app" of data points that can be paired and filtered.

And how does FindTheBest fact-check and stay up to date? More humans. "Some of that updating will be automated and some done by the researchers but we also hope experts, business owners and people who are passionate and follow a subject will also jump in and provide updates to our researchers," spokeswoman Amy Morris said in an email.

See something missing in the James Bond app? You can register and add information to be reviewed by the site's researchers.

"The semantic web just doesn't happen," O'Connor told CNN recently. "Someone's got to organize it."

Not quite there yet

FindTheBest says it has more than 500 comparison apps with more in the works. But some of the apps are not really useful - this app to compare cell phone reception, for example, was confusing and hard to manipulate in a useful way. And it's going to take a lot more than 330 hand-built spreadsheets to answer enough questions to establish FindTheBest as a destination for comparison-based decisions the way Expedia.com and other travel shopping comparison engines have.

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."

"There are additional end-user features which we can consider developing that will leverage the user-cookie," says the document, which was compiled by an advertising executive who came to Google from DoubleClick, the global online advertising giant Google acquired in 2007.

An excerpt from the internal memo obtained by the WSJ.

One idea: A "Get Paid" option where users could share their personal data in exchange for a discount on their Internet bills or other compensation.

Another idea proposed offering ads targeted to high profile individuals like Larry Page. Page and other famous people could opt-in to see ads targeted specifically to them while browsing the Google Content Network, which includes sites that display Google ads.

"While the volume of such ads may not be high, end users who use them would enjoy this," the document says.

Other "wacky" ideas

Two of the ideas involved charging users to have control over what ads, if any, they see. "Cookie Viewer Preferences Management," would allow users to block ads, specify ad types they prefer such as text-only or categories of ads such as "coupons." "Bid on yourself" is a way for users to bid on ad slots. When they win, no ad or a blank ad would appear - basically a way to pay not to receive ads.

Facebook envy?

The document's authors also imagine "social ads" that would let users advertise to friends who opted-in. This one stinks of Facebook, which allows users to create groups, events and fan pages that facilitate advertising-style communication. (The WSJ reports Facebook was a major reason Google capitulated to advertisers who wanted access to more user data.)

The document's authors also promote this idea as a way to "send wacky messages" and "make advertising an interactive/fun platform for end users."

Wacky - or just not worth it?

It's probably not the unconventionality that caused these ideas to be marginalized alongside strokes of brilliance like "retargeting" - targeting users who have already visited a website - and a "data exchange" that would allow companies to sell and auction the data they own. These ideas are "wacky" because the revenue they'd bring in would be peanuts compared to Google's other options for monetizing data.

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.

According to an article on PaidContent, this latest move by Google "involves the promise of greater simplicity as it aims for smaller publishers". DoubleClick for Publishers offers a simple, free version of DFP for small businesses and another (not free) for larger websites - likely customers of DoubleClick DART.

The new service offers a redesigned interface, more detailed reporting, algorithms to automatically improve ad performance and a public API to allow for third-party apps to use the DFP system.

DFP will allow its users to perform a number of functions, from running different ads at different times, according to when they best perform, to mixing and matching different priced ads to various page locations.

We think that the increased focus on small businesses is a growing trend in online advertising, as we just saw with Facebook announcing last week that it would begin accepting PayPal for advertising. It seems that many of these big companies are realizing that they may be missing out on innumerable revenue streams from small businesses by making the task of advertising daunting and complicated. A dollar is a dollar, after all, and increasing accessibility while reducing confusion should only increase the number of dollars coming in.

All these experiments are mere rounding errors in Google's financial results. So why does it matter? Confidence matters to Google. More importantly, the fear of Google matters. It is important to them that every initiative has the early adopters jumping on board and declaring the space that Google has just entered to be "game over" for the existing players. Then VCs won't back anybody in that space.

This game worked for Microsoft for decades. But the market is bigger and savvier today and the Internet just looks too darned big for any single firm to dominate.

The Bigger Game - Creating More Content for Search

One explanation for Google's almost anarchic experimentation is that revenue from those products don't matter. They just want more "search fodder" to feed their cash cow. That makes sense. Zoho is committed to being ad free, as is Wikipedia. They have different reasons for being ad free, but that is not what matters.

If Google doesn't dominate web office, they will only be offering advertising on those who cannot afford to pay Zoho their really low price - which sounds like advertising to the sub, sub prime market. If Knol cannot get content up to Wikipedia standards, advertisers will have to associate with sub, sub prime content.

That does not look like the strategy of a winner.

What About Chrome?

Chrome showed Google's brand power in the market. A pretty geeky story (better performance and sandbox security for plug-ins) got tremendous traction in the media and prompted people who had never even made the jump from Explorer to Firefox to look at Chrome.

But it is very hard to see any strategic advantage for Google in splintering the browser market even further. Surely their interest lies in making sure Firefox gains against Explorer? Why not simply continue helping Mozilla?

This looks like an engineering project (yes, a very cool engineering project) that got out to market with a "oh, well, why not, seems a shame to throw it away" rationale.

Has Boredom Become an Issue Inside the Googleplex?

It is almost as if Google is bored. The cash just keeps rolling in. How do they exercise those amazing minds? This is not an uncommon problem. My first job was with a small publishing company in London that had one amazing cash cow and lots of "loss leaders". I naively asked one of the owners why he did this, why not just have the cash cow? He thought for a while and said "well, what would I do every day?"

YouTube, Now That's a Biggie, Right?

Well yes, it is the dominant online video sharing site. However as an advertising business YouTube still has big problems and may still be losing money. At Web 2.0 I asked many people "how would you monetize YouTube?" and a surprising number came up with the solution of getting people to pay to upload. It sounds plausible, small amounts from millions of uploads might add up. But that is totally contrary to Google's mantra of free content funded by advertising and it would allow a "free to upload" competitor to potentially disrupt the market.

Is The Sum Bigger Than the Parts?

Google looks increasingly like a giant private equity firm with lots of unrelated businesses betting on one making it big.

About one year ago, an internal document by Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, said that Yahoo was spreading its resources too thinly, like peanut butter on a slice of bread.

Is Google doing the same? Albeit with a cash cow that is massively better than Yahoo's?

What do you think? Is Google spreading itself too thin?