I think more people still use search engines on a daily basis, but more people spend more time on Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social sites to search for people they know, and stay in touch with family and friends they don't see that often, or use social networks to follow celebrities, and hobbies like video games, PC gaming, food, and gardening since social networks are like a simplified version of blogs and forum.
But, I think when there are more content, and things to do, or you can find to do on social networks, more people will use social networks for reading the news/finding links to news articles, and playing games when you can play Full PC games on web browsers via social networks.
Ask, Bing, AltaVista, etc and many smaller search engines don't really seem to have a high search percentage while social sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, etc are growing bigger and bigger every month.
More people use search engines but social networks like Facebook are going to topple them in coming years. I wouldn't be so sure about Facebook just disappearing. It is becoming more than just a network, as other businesses are putting their apps and features on to Facebook. Facebook is becoming a whole new 'world' or 'platform' for everything else.
They're two completing different things. There's no way search engines will kill social networks and I don't see social networks causing search engines any trouble either.
Maybe they just combine into one giant website, or work together to provide better information for people who are searching for information.
I notice search engines like Google now display more social results from Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Yahoo Answers, eHow, and many other social websites compared to static websites which are non-social when you search for people, movies, brands, and celebrities.
Twitter is currently the fastest way to spread popular news because of re-twetts/posts like Occupy Wallstreet, revolutions from Egypt, and Libya. It can take a long time for search engines to display the latest news in seconds like Twitter.
The one advantage of social networks are that they can give famous members badges proving they are the real famous person like Obama with the Verified by Twitter badge while sometimes search engines bring back results from fake Obama websites.
I think there are more popular social networks then popular search engines since Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr are all popular, but there is only one popular search engine which is Google since Bing, Ask, Yahoo, and all the other smaller search engines don't have the amount of searches Google has per day.
But, I think social networks are probably mainly popular in North America, and western countries while search is popular everywhere.
I never really met many people on social networks which were from Asia, Africa, or South America.
