What’s the most popular website in the World?
After reading the title you all
probably immediately know the answer. Heck, most of you probably came to this
article via king of the dot-com hill, Google.
Given Google is a pretty
much no-brainer for most of the western countries; you may be surprised at how
much competition they’re putting up with in other parts of the world.
Thanks to a development team known as Webempires, we can take a causal gander at
this global market full of surprising results with their number one website by
country map.
Looking at their map we can
clearly see Google’s grip on the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and
Australia. However, there’s a lot more to the world than that.
It seems large parts of Northern
Africa have been into Facebook. That’s seems about right since in the past year
and a half these countries have been more involved in communicating and
organizing protests than looking up lolcats. Mongolia and the South Pacific
Islands also seem to be into Facebook more than any search engine. I reckon
they’re big Farmville fans.
Two countries with a tendency to
do things their own way, Russia and China, don’t disappoint in this area
either. In China, search engine Baidu was more than happy to fill the void left
by Google after their falling out with the country. Baidu is currently
the 5th most used website according to Alexa, which is a testament to the
massive population of that country.
Russia meanwhile has found a
friend in Yandex. Although an uncommon name outside of Russian and other
Eastern European countries, Yandex is much appreciated for its superior
understanding of the Russian language when used in search
queries.
This leaves that strange
dark spot over Japan. Too small to read, that blotch actually
represents Yahoo. Yes, according to Alexa, the Japanese language Yahoo alone
reaches the number 16 spot worldwide. That’s a very impressive ranking for such
a limited language worldwide.
So why does Japan love Yahoo so
much? Based on one die hard user I talked to, “their top page hardly ever
changes format.” True words since looking at the Yahoo.co.jp top
page, it looks nearly identical to the Yahoo from ten years ago compared to
their dot-com
counterpart which has made some modest changes over the
years.
So it seems much of Japan
appreciates consistency in their websites, which is interesting since that’s one
of Google’s key points too. Yahoo just seemed to beat them to the punch here
and is enjoying the rewards – for now…
- Umesh Shanmgam
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