

Age of Internet Empires: One Map With Each Country's Favorite Website - jeanbebe
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/age-of-internet-empires-one-map-with-each-countrys-favorite-website/280287/

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TranceMan
The 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?

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DanBC
Here'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-empire...](http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/age-of-internet-
empires/>)

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.

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yayitsrob
Hey, 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.

~~~
TranceMan
Thanks for replying and updating.

Sorry to nitpick but why did you choose to use the word 'Favorite'? The
research shows 'most visited' \- they are not the same.

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raamdev
Yahoo's prevalence in Japan surprised me the most.

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ojii
Living 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.

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Pxtl
I 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.

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exo_duz
Yahoo came into Japan by selling part of them to Softbank (Son Masayoshi).
This led them to be a separate entity to Yahoo Global. E.g. if you try to find
a job in Yahoo Global you will not find jobs listed in Japan and vice versa.

Google came in thinking that they can implement US/Western practices which
allowed them to be successful overseas. This unfortunately does not work.

Japan's market is very unique and very self sustaining. Due to the population
and the way the people behave. For example Yahoo Auctions is still the number
1 auction website in the world whereas Ebay has never penetrated the market.
And Ebay also has moved into the form of a marketplace over the last few
years. Yahoo Auctions has largely not changed over the years.

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Systemic33
Interesting 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.

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colkassad
Considering 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.

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guard-of-terra
Yandex doesn't have search majority in Belarus but VK has social network
majority.

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jeanbebe
Google'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.

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timje1
registering RISKR.com as we speak..

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Peroni
I reckon risk.ie might be more fitting.

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pmelendez
No 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.

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seiji
We need more options for the future of humanity than Aspie Montessori Naive
Google vs. Aspie Megalomanic Socially Depraved Facebook.

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pmelendez
I understand your point but having a son diagnosed to be in the spectrum, I
don't appreciate the "Aspie" reference.

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seiji
It'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.

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adventured
The issue isn't fact vs fiction, but that you're being extremely insensitive
and using what's considered a derogatory term.

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seiji
Everything is derogatory if you are predisposed to being offended.

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pmelendez
It is not a predisposition. You are using a term that was actually deprecated
this year as synonym of "hyper focussed" individuals which is actually just an
stereotype, most people on the spectrum aren't hyper-focussed.

As an example, homosexuality once was considered a mental disorder and it is
full of stereotypes. And I am sure that homosexual people would be very
offended if someone starts using the term as a synonym of hiper-sexuality.

Also I am very sure that someone would say that is a fact based on anecdotical
experience, and hence is not derogatory.

For me a misuse of a term using it as a cliché is indeed derogatory.

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kijin
> _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.

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jsnk
It 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-
empire...](http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/age-of-internet-empires/)

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krosaen
> 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?

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jivid
Google 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.

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spindritf
Facebook dominance seems to correlate with poverty.

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pmelendez
Norway is far from being a poor country but I see your point...

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jeanbebe
#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?

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bobz
Take 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.

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jeanbebe
How is DuckDuckGo doing?

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m_for_monkey
Not bad:
[https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html](https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

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jeanbebe
Ukraine is game to you!?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fzLt...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fzLtF_PxbYw)

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LanceH
Interesting that facebook does better on islands that aren't Oceania.

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vacri
Indonesia 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.

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prawn
Facebook has always been at war with Eastasia, err, Google.

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contingencies
Does this support "lower education levels equals greater facebook use"?

