NEW YORK (AFP) - Facebook is challenging Googles supremacy on the Internet with a radically different approach to how people live, work, play and search online. While Google delivers search results selected by algorithms that take into account a users Web history, Facebook boasts a richer level of personalisation based on ones own likes and the recommendations of Facebook friends. Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room six years ago and is now worth an estimated 6.9 billion dollars, refers to it as the social graph. I think what weve found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about they tend to be more engaging, Zuckerberg said in an interview with the CBS show 60 Minutes. The social graph is incredibly broad, said Wedbush Securities social media analyst Lou Kerner, picking up on Zuckerbergs favourite ph-rase. It includes not only what you do and what you like but people you know and what they like and the companies you interact with. For some Internet watchers like Kerner, Facebook is building a parallel network built around the interactions of its more than 500 million members. I refer to Facebook as the second Internet, maybe more valuable than the first because were all interconnected on it, Kerner told AFP. Social media is an increasingly important part of how you reach people and its a growing part of every marketers budget, he said. The idea is you do not want to fight Facebook, you want to embrace Facebook and leverage Facebook because this is where people are going to spend increasing amounts of time, he said. According to online tracking firm comScore, Google receives more unique monthly visitors than Facebook but visitors to Facebook spend more time at the site than they do on Google properties. Since this spring, Facebook has been rolling out features which put it on a collision course with Google an @facebook.com email service which competes with Googles Gmail and Facebook Questions, a search engine of sorts which lets Facebook members ask questions and get answers from other members. Facebook has also been facing off with Google on the hiring front, forcing the Mountain View, California-based Google to recently raise salaries by 10 percent across the board. Theyve become competitive in some areas, but its not that Facebook has grown at Googles expense or that Facebook is growing and Google is shrinking, said Danny Sullivan, editor of technology blog SearchEngineLand.com. Google is not going away, agreed Kerner. Google, in fact, I think is going to benefit from the emergence of social media. Because what its doing is its driving people to spend more time online and when youre spending more time online, you end up doing more searches, he said. Where theyve really been encroaching on each other more is in the display space, Sullivan said. Facebook has a lot of people who buy display advertising. Google wants to sell more display advertising. Sullivan also said Google has been trying to encroach on their social area, but they havent been very successful. Zuckerberg, in the 60 Minutes interview, acknowledged there are areas where the companies compete. But then, there are all these areas where we just dont compete at all, he said. Facebooks growth is not necessarily a bad thing for Google, which has been coming under increased scrutiny from anti-trust authorities in both the United States and Europe. Some of it plays very well for Google, Sullivan said. Google is able to say 'You know, we have this stiff competition out there. Its not necessarily to Googles disadvantage that Facebook is growing.