NEW YORK – As content-location vehicles, social media are gaining on search engines in popularity and one day may take over from giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing, according to the results of a new survey by audience measurer Nielsen.Search remains the dominant form of internet navigation, but “over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media,” Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs wrote on the company’s Nielsen Wire blog.

“We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way,” he added.

Nielsen fielded an online panel of 1,800 participants in August in order to examine the three main ways in which consumers locate content: search, portals and social media. The survey discovered 18 percent of users employ social media, including blogs, as a core navigation and information-discovery tool.

“As social media usage continues to increase (unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 959 percent year-over-year in August), I can only expect this figure to grow,” Gibs wrote.

The survey indicated about 37 percent of participants currently use search engines as their primary discovery mechanism. Thirty-four percent use portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL. About 11 percent seek information and news on “niched” sites like CNET.com. The 18 percent of social media users breaks down into nine percent at Wikipedia, five percent on blogs and four percent at Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

“At the root of the changing nature of content discovery is the sheer amount of information that is available on the Web,” Gibs wrote. “If you want to learn more about the latest smartphone released into the market, your favorite search engine is sure to provide you with hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about the device. But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value. Socializers — those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media — feel this effect more than others do. When asked, 26 percent [of Socializers] feel there is too much information available on the internet, compared to 18 percent of people who predominantly use portals and just 5 percent of people who primarily use search engines.”

In Gibs’ view, Socializers trust what friends and virtual acquaintances have to say, “and social media acts as an information filtration tool.”

“Social media is becoming a core product research channel,” Gibs noted. “Almost 15 percent of Socializers most trusted information they found on blogs when researching new purchases online, while nearly 20 percent trusted most the information they found on message boards.

Information found on Facebook or Twitter was the least trusted by Socializers, with only about 8 percent finding those sources helpful. Among the social media, message boards were the most trusted resource across all categories of users, even those who prefer to find what they seek via search engines or portals.

“So are social networks replacing portals or search engines?” Gibs asked. “Perhaps. Regardless, if we don’t understand and address people feeling increasingly alienated by the amount of information on the internet and the need for a human guide, yes, your favorite social network (or something like it) will become the next great content gateway.”