Age of Internet Empires: One Map With Each Country's Favorite Website

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/age-of-internet-empires-one-map-with-each-countrys-favorite-website/280287/

by jeanbebe • 13 years ago

83 56 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

jeanbebe4• 13 years ago

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.

choult• 13 years ago

Shouldn't that be "RISC"?

timje1• 13 years ago

registering RISKR.com as we speak..

Peroni• 13 years ago

I reckon risk.ie might be more fitting.

raamdev• 13 years ago

Yahoo's prevalence in Japan surprised me the most.

ojii2• 13 years ago

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.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

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.

OvidNaso• 13 years ago

Wasn't Yahoo! Japan also a large ISP or major ISP partner? Concerning a canceled move many years ago, my limited searching found Yahoo branded internet was very prevalent and a darn good deal.

jallardice• 13 years ago

There is a brief explanation of the reasons behind that (with links to further information) in the article:

Yahoo! succeeds in Japan and Taiwan through its nearly two-decade-old partnership with Japanese SoftBank and its 2007 purchase of Wretch, a Taiwanese social networking site.

jrmg• 13 years ago

That makes it sound 50/50, but it's more diluted than that - Yahoo Inc. only owns 35.15% of Yahoo Japan. Softbank owns a little more - 35.86%. The rest is owned by much smaller shareholders.

See the bottom table in http://ir.yahoo.co.jp/en/holder/status.html

cclogg• 13 years ago

I didn't see Taiwan on the map by the way, but yeah it's a joke amongst my Taiwanese friends that you're not a true Taiwanese unless your browser homepage is http://tw.yahoo.com/

expertentipp• 13 years ago

It's funny how Yahoo Maps use HERE Maps with minimal coverage of Japan

exo_duz3• 13 years ago

Living 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.

dicemoose2• 13 years ago

Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google for search instead of Bing, as a result Google has the largest slice of the search market in Japan.

bitwize• 13 years ago

Japan is life support for brands thought long dead in the 90s. Excite still has a presence there and, until recently, so did InfoSeek.

exo_duz3• 13 years ago

I think it's more that the country is so self sustaining that it does not feel it requires to change. As well as the people being quite inflexible.

Which is why Japan is now behind Korea in electronics.

spindritf• 13 years ago

Facebook dominance seems to correlate with poverty.

pmelendez4• 13 years ago

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

Systemic33• 13 years ago

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.

colkassad• 13 years ago

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.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

Yandex doesn't have search majority in Belarus but VK has social network majority.

ernesth• 13 years 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.

kalleboo• 13 years ago

In Sweden, the most visited local site is the #1 tabloid (aftonbladet.se).

Dewie• 13 years 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.

TranceMan2• 13 years ago

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?

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

The original was sourced on HN a few days ago and I believe Alexa was used.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

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...

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> Some of the current projects on the research page are fascinating.

yayitsrob• 13 years ago

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.

pmelendez4• 13 years ago

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.

seiji3• 13 years ago

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

pmelendez4• 13 years ago

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

prawn• 13 years ago

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

kijin• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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...

rhplus• 13 years ago

Perhaps, also, Chinese users within China are using VPNs or proxies that surface in South Korea?

jeanbebe4• 13 years ago

Ukraine is game to you!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fzLt...

jeanbebe4• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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.

jeanbebe4• 13 years ago

How is DuckDuckGo doing?

adventured2• 13 years ago

Inflection 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).

znowi• 13 years ago

#1 It is crazy and I see a toolbar on just about any average user computer. However, most people do not explicitly install them. They're being silently opted-in or gently coerced into it.

#2 and #3 Google is so influential that it's highly unlikely to happen on the current playfield. They either buy a potential competitor out or cripple their business. I can only see two opportunities for this: a) specialized niche search, b) search based on a new disruptive technology.

LanceH• 13 years ago

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

vacri• 13 years ago

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.

krosaen• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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.

contingencies• 13 years ago

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

Age of Internet Empires: One Map With Each Country's Favorite Website

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