In a blog post today, Compete.com published the following graphs to show where people spent their time online. While MySpace takes the lead, Yahoo is a runner-up, and Google is a disappointed fifth place. These results, however, are scarcely surprising.

If Google's ranking does surprise you, Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal offers some input:

Well you shouldn’t be as most of the time spent on Google is probably GMail or search. Their other channels aren’t really popular enough to suck up all of our online time, and Google is so efficient that ideally, they should not be listed anywhere near MySpace.

A distinction that no one seems to articulate, however, is the kind of traffic that each of these site receive respectively. First of all, Yahoo is a popular homepage for many users because its main page is content intensive, and has been so for many, many years. Aside from being relatively new, the Google homepage, on the other hand, is not at Google.com, but on a sub-page. The content, moreover, is not as readily pre-packaged as Yahoo's

As for MySpace, considering how 64% of US teens with internet access are signed up, it seems likely that much of their user base just never bothers to log-out. Indeed, anyone who knows a MySpace addict (and there are many) could agree.

I wouldn't be surprised that if Google moved their homepage to their main page, they would quickly out-pace Yahoo for the #1 spot. Of course, there is a lot to be said for the minimalist layout of Google's main page.