8 ms·
Age of Internet Empires: One Map With Each Country's Favorite Website
- TranceMan 13y agoThe article is a little light on the details which data was used and compiled - are the majority of Google hits due to that being a persons default url when they open their web browser?
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoThe original was sourced on HN a few days ago and I believe Alexa was used.
- DanBC 13y agoHere's the site of the researchers. There's not a huge amount of information there, but they use Alexa. <http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/age-of-internet-empires/> http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/age-of-internet-empire... It is very frustrating when articles do not link to the research they are reporting on. I suspect that they haven't read the research, and are just reporting from the press releases. If anyone from The Atlantic is reading (because you're certainly posting here) please could you try to get source links into the articles? Here's the homepage for one of the researchers. <http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=165> http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=165> Some of the current projects on the research page are fascinating.
- yayitsrob 13y agoHey, this is the author of the post at The Atlantic. I thought I had linked to the research; it was totally my bad that in fact I hadn’t. It should be fixed now (or in the next 3 min, when our server refreshes). EDIT: To be clear, too, I try to make it a policy to link to the original research in my articles, even if (alas) that research is sometimes behind a pay- or journalwall. It was an accident, and my fault, that it wasn’t first linked to here.
- pmelendez 13y agoNo wonder why Google is trying to push Google+ so badly. Although I don't know what is worse, a world dominated by the New Google or by -the always full of controversy- Facebook.
- seiji 13y agoWe need more options for the future of humanity than Aspie Montessori Naive Google vs. Aspie Megalomanic Socially Depraved Facebook.
- pmelendez 13y agoI understand your point but having a son diagnosed to be in the spectrum, I don't appreciate the "Aspie" reference.
- seiji 13y agoIt's not derogatory, just fact. The "aspie-ness" ramps down trivialities of the world and lets people hyper-focus on individual issues. When that hyper-focus is pointed towards "personal gain at all costs," the world suffers. HFA people are, by definition, HF enough to operate coherently in the world. Sure, they may be considered "weird" or have no friends or wake up one morning and realize life has passed them by while they were hyper-focused on one thing for ten years, but they are still in and of the world.
- adventured 13y agoThe issue isn't fact vs fiction, but that you're being extremely insensitive and using what's considered a derogatory term.
- seiji 13y agoEverything is derogatory if you are predisposed to being offended.
- prawn 13y agoFacebook has always been at war with Eastasia, err, Google.
- jeanbebe 13y agoGoogle's domination is still kind of amazing. Also, there should be a new version of RISK: The Game of World Domination. It should feature tech companies as the attacking hordes.
- raamdev 13y agoYahoo's prevalence in Japan surprised me the most.
- expertentipp 13y agoIt's funny how Yahoo Maps use HERE Maps with minimal coverage of Japan
- exo_duz 13y agoLiving in Japan I can say that Yahoo Maps is number 1 in detail. Although Google Maps is catching up in terms of service and information now. And I also believe there is a market shift amongst younger people from Yahoo Japan.
- ojii 13y agoLiving in Japan, it's not that surprising. Until a few years ago Yahoo had far superior services in Japan for things such as transit directions. I remember 5 years ago trying to get around Tokyo using Google Maps with no success, but the Yahoo counterpart worked perfectly despite being harder for me to use since the UI was in Japanese only. These days, Google has equal or better services (although Yahoo still has some services Google does not provide such as an auction house). But inertia keeps people on Yahoo and Yahoo Japan is still very good, also they have close deals with Softbank (mobile phone carrier) which helps them keeping people on their sites.
- Pxtl 13y agoI wonder how Google missed that market - is that something Yahoo does better? That is, does Yahoo have better regional offices to take the local market? I know Google often drags their feet about going international with some products.
- ojii 13y agoYahoo! Japan is it's own company that only focuses on the Japanese market. As far as I know Google does not have a setup like this. Yahoo! Japan is owned mostly by Softbank and Yahoo! (see other comment).
- spindritf 13y agoFacebook dominance seems to correlate with poverty.
- pmelendez 13y agoNorway is far from being a poor country but I see your point...
- Systemic33 13y agoInteresting that the most popular site in Kazakhstan is a russian site. (Mail.ru) Another interesting thing to measure would be the most popular national website, ie. for denmark, the most popular .dk domain, and then represented in size per population. EDIT: I'd hypothesize that the top website would be whatever bank has the most customers, or websites for government functions.
- colkassad 13y agoConsidering the number of Russians I know from Kazakhstan, it doesn't surprise me that it's a Russian site. However, it's interesting that its mail.ru and not Yandex. And why VK in Belarus and not Yandex? I realize that VK is enormous and at least in the top 5 most visited sites in Russia.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoYandex doesn't have search majority in Belarus but VK has social network majority.
- ernesth 13y ago> the most popular .dk domain google.dk obviously :) Or if you want real local websites, I would assume a newspaper or tv channel website (unless they all live in the .tv domain). Alexa seems to confirm this for Denmark: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/DK http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/DK.
- kalleboo 13y agoIn Sweden, the most visited local site is the #1 tabloid (aftonbladet.se).
- Dewie 13y ago> Interesting that the most popular site in Kazakhstan is a russian site. (Mail.ru) Most Kazakhs speak Russian (perhaps more than those who speak Kazakh?), according to Wikipedia anyway.
- kijin 13y ago> Baidu dominates China, though its spill-over popularity into neighboring countries makes the researchers doubt whether data from those countries is accurate. The data for Korea clearly isn't accurate. Baidu is almost unheard of in this country. Not many young people can even read Chinese. Naver, a local company, dominates 70% of the Korean search market and a significant portion of the social networking scene as well. Its anti-competitive behavior is currently a hot topic in Korea. I suppose the anomaly is due to the fact that the authors used Alexa (mentioned in the bottom right of the second image). Hardly anyone in Korea has the Alexa toolbar installed. People here, like elsewhere, pollute their PCs with all sorts of other toolbars, but rarely Alexa. The language barrier probably plays a part. I wouldn't be surprised if those who do have Alexa (usually foreigners) tend to have ties to a certain neighboring country with a very large population.
- jsnk 13y agoIt seems like the original research does mention this problem. "At the same time, we see a puzzling fact that Baidu is also listed as the most visited website in South Korea (ahead of the popular South Korean search engine, Naver). We speculate that the raw data that we are using here are skewed." http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/age-of-internet-empires/ http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/age-of-internet-empire...
- rhplus 13y agoPerhaps, also, Chinese users within China are using VPNs or proxies that surface in South Korea?
- jeanbebe 13y agoUkraine is game to you!? https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fzLtF_PxbYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fzLt...
- jeanbebe 13y ago#1 People still install toolbars, that's crazy to me. #2 Google has so many popular products (search, gmail, youtube, maps) that it makes sense that they're that big. It's equivalent to a person having a bank account with $1bil in it. Just leaving that money in the account and raking interest, you just continue to get bigger by being. In google's case, there isn't strong enough competition to stop them from "being" and gaining more share based on their prior efforts. #3 Could a new US based search engine compete with Google? Or are they just that big that the task is a fool's errand?
- bobz 13y agoTake a look at DuckDuckGo (if you prefer independent entrepreneurial upstart) or Bing (if you prefer massive well funded corporate competitor) to see what getting in the ring with Google looks like.
- jeanbebe 13y agoHow is DuckDuckGo doing?
- m_for_monkey 13y agoNot bad: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
- adventured 13y agoInflection points in technology open up opportunities for new competition once a mega company has won a space. It's a fool's errand to try to beat Google at the game they've perfected and were built for. By the time you could very slowly wrest control of search from Google, the whole tech world will have changed and your point of competition will no longer matter. That's the foolishness of Bing, for example. It's great that companies still try to compete with them, but all they will accomplish is to keep making Google better (and that's a good thing for consumers); they won't 'beat' them however under any circumstances. Google will be beat in search the same way Microsoft was in operating systems: a dramatic sea shift in technology (with Android now being by far the most important operating system going forward).
- LanceH 13y agoInteresting that facebook does better on islands that aren't Oceania.
- vacri 13y agoIndonesia and Malaysia aren't part of Oceania, nor are the British Isles. 'Oceania' is a way of saying "those Anglo countries that think they're part of South East Asia, but aren't. And we'll throw in the polynesians as well so it's not so obvious what we're doing...". So many times when I see references to 'Oceania', people are really just talking about Aus/NZ, and sometimes even just Aus.
- krosaen 13y ago> Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google). Does that mean they aren't defining Google as Google properties? What would the map look like if they did?
- jivid 13y agoGoogle would be defined as google.com (or the appropriate geo-specific domain) since this map is specifically for websites, not companies owning the most popular products . As for what would happen if they did group by company? I'm guessing that Google would be #1 pretty much everywhere, save maybe Russia and China.
- jivid 13y agoGoogle would be defined as google.com (or the appropriate geo-specific domain) since this map is specifically for websites, not companies owning the most popular products . As for what would happen if they did group by company? I'm guessing that Google would be #1 pretty much everywhere, save maybe Russia and China.
- contingencies 13y agoDoes this support "lower education levels equals greater facebook use"?