It seems that Facebook users’ ability to share links through the social networkin service is changing the way people browse, with traffic from Facebook beginning to outweigh traffic from Google.

According to a report from Compete Inc. picked up by the folks over at the San Francisco Chronicle, Facebook has passed out Google, claiming the top spot when it comes to sending traffic to other major web portals, including Yahoo and MSN. The fact is that people tend to trust content recommended by their “friends” on social networking services, leading to them pursuing that content quite readily.

Indeed, the piece quotes social media firm Gigya’s Dave Yovanno as having said of the trend,

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities … That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”

It’s certainly some fairly interesting stuff, and perhaps one of the biggest shifts (late as it might seem) to have come out of the whole web 2.0 revolution. The fact that so many web users seem happy to peruse content recommended to them by friends represents something of a democratisation of content that means that a content creator needn’t necessarily have the best search engine optimisation or faultless promotion; if the content is appreciated then it’s more likely to be passed around among friends, with those recommendations often being distributed through services like Facebook.

That said, Facebook only leads Google in traffic to web portals, it seems that Google still dominates when it comes to traffic sent to just about any other category of content.