Google has finally hit back to Facebook with a signal that one day, Google + will take over the web social net workers from Facebook.

On Monday Zuckerberg of Facebook in a interview with Charlie Rose said that Google was trying to make its own “little version of Facebook.”.

Zuckerberg told Rose that “Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook,”

The statement was well picked up in the Google corridors and Bradly Horowitz, Google’s vice president for product on Google+ told Bloomberg that he’s “delighted to be underestimated” by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

Many media houses and webmasters have been reporting that Google + was going down and that users where running away from the platform back to Facebook. But Horowitz Says Interest in Google+ Pages Is `Stunning’

“Today [users] come back to us in a largely unidentified state,” he said. “The way that we think about Google+ is changing this mode of interaction so that we get to know our users deeply… and then reflect that back as value to them.”

Horowitz also said that user engagement is very high, contrary to reports in the media that the site had seen a traffic slump and that users were not staying on the site for very long. He also said that the platform has far more than 40 millions users from the time Larry Page first unveiled the figures.