If the internet was a monarchy and the world could be divided into empires based on the websites they visit most, who do you think us South African‘s belong to?
Well, a new study has done just that. The University of Oxford has released an “œAge of Internet Empires“ map, that illustrates which website is the most visited in each country.
Aside from the clever name, the “œAge of Internet Empires“ map is actually very interesting.
Although, it might be obvious which two websites own the most empires; the divine Google and unconquered social media site, Facebook.
Google‘s immense power over the worldwide web is evident in the study.
“œThe power of Google on the Internet becomes starkly evident if we also look at the second most visited website in every country,“ the study said.
However, Facebook is not far behind: “œFacebook, in contrast, is the most visited website in most of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as much of the Spanish-speaking Americas.“ the research shows.
While most of the world is fairly straight forward, things get a little different in Asia.
Apparently, this is because local competitors in Asia have been able to avoid Google and Facebook.
Baidu, a well known search engine in China, is the most used. This is probably because China is home to the world‘s largest internet population; half a billion users.
Other Asian countries that have overthrown Google and Facebook is Japan and Taiwan, that use Yahoo Japan and Yahoo Taiwan the most.
There are many other interesting sites that seem to be king of the crop in countries such as Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia.
The data for the study was collected by using a programme called Alexa. Alexa collects data from millions of internet users by using browser extensions.
The data collected by Alexa for this study was accessed on August 12th of this year.
So it seems South Africa is part of the Google empire – just like most of the world.
Check out the two maps of the “œAge of Internet Empires“ below:
Source: MyBroadband
