Tag Archives: Web search engine

Arts, Business, Google, Government, Research, Science, Society, Technology

How different internet giants dominate countries across the globe…

WORLDWIDE ANALYSIS OF SEARCH ENGINE USE

China’s Baidu is popular in Korea, ahead of its own search engine Naver.

Google has become so much a part of everyday life many people now use the brand name as a verb for searching, but a new map highlights exactly how far and wide the site spreads across the globe.

The map, created by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, used data from millions of people’s browsing history worldwide and shows Google as the most popular site, in 62 countries.

Facebook was the second most visited site globally, in 50 countries, while the third place site – China’s Baidu search engine, was popular in just two countries.

The map, pictured, was created by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute. It used data from millions of people's browsing history worldwide and shows Google as the most popular site, in 62 countries, shown in red. Facebook, shown in blue, was the second most visited site globally, in 50 countries

The map, pictured, was created by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute. It used data from millions of people’s browsing history worldwide and shows Google as the most popular site, in 62 countries, shown in red. Facebook, shown in blue, was the second most visited site globally, in 50 countries

To work out the number of visitors, Dr Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata from the institute combined the number of estimated average daily unique visitors, with the estimated number of page views for that site from users in a particular country, for a particular month.

The data shown in the map covers the period of July and August this year and uses information collected by website analytics firm Alexa.

Each colour represents that most visited website in that country and each three individual blocks represent around one million users.

The countries are unusual sizes as the map effectively exaggerates countries that almost exclusively use one type of search engine.

Google is shown in red, Facebook is blue. Yahoo is shown in purple and has a stronghold over Japan, while China’s favourite site is the search engine Baidu.

Baidu is also popular in Korea, ahead of the country’s own search engine Naver.

The majority of most-visited sites were search engines, but Facebook was also popular.

Although Facebook was predominantly popular in the west, it was also the most visited site in Nepal and Mongolia.

The Al-Watan Voice newspaper was the most visited website in the Palestinian Territories, the email service Mail.ru is the most visited site in Kazakhstan, the social network VK was the most visited in Belarus, and the search engine Yandex was the most popular site in Russia.

The researchers said: ‘The supremacy of Google and Facebook over any other site on the Web is clearly apparent. We also see an interesting geographical continuity of these two ’empires’.

Google is shown in red, Facebook is blue. Yahoo is shown in purple and has a stronghold over Japan, while China's favourite site is the search engine Baidu, shown in green. Baidu is also popular in Korea, ahead of the country's own search engine Naver

Google is shown in red, Facebook is blue. Yahoo is shown in purple and has a stronghold over Japan, while China’s favourite site is the search engine Baidu, shown in green. Baidu is also popular in Korea, ahead of the country’s own search engine Naver

‘The situation is more complex in Asia, as local competitors have been able to resist the two large American empires.

‘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 search engine Naver.

‘We speculate that the raw data that we are using here are skewed. However, we may also be seeing the Baidu empire in the process of expanding beyond its traditional home territory.’

Areas in sub-saharan Africa aren’t covered by Alexa, yet Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, and South Africa are within the sphere of Google’s empire. Whereas Ghana, Senegal, and Sudan prefer Facebook.

On this map the countries bathed in blue are used to depict the global spread of Facebook, as of September 2013. The map shows a rising popularity in Africa, South America, and India - as also highlighted in the Oxford Institute map

On this map the countries bathed in blue are used to depict the global spread of Facebook, as of September 2013. The map shows a rising popularity in Africa, South America, and India – as also highlighted in the Oxford Institute map

Among the 50 countries where Facebook was listed as the most visited website, 36 of them had Google as the second most visited, with the remaining 14 countries listing YouTube, the Google-owned video site.

The countries where Google is the most visited website account for half of the entire internet population – over one billion people.

A large proportion of the population in China and South Korea use the internet, giving Baidu second place overall in terms of visitors.

The 50 Facebook countries account for about 280 million users, placing the social network in third.

‘We are likely still in the very beginning of the Age of Internet Empires,’ the researchers conclude.

‘But, it may well be that the territories carved out now will have important implications for which companies end up controlling how we communicate and access information for many years to come.’

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Britain, Google, Government

Government sets out a discussion paper on how the census might be replaced…

THE DEMISE OF THE TRADITIONAL CENSUS?

Every ten years Britons and UK residents are required to complete a lengthy census form. Issued by the Government, it takes a lot to make the prospect of completing the form appealing.

A suggestion has been made that Google’s vast stores of data could soon help replace the laborious task of manually filing a compulsory questionnaire.

Internet search engines could be used as a source of cheap information on citizen’s lives, interests and movements, according to a government paper.

It could spell the end of the national census, which was first conducted in 1801 and has been carried out every ten years since, apart from during the Second World War.

It aims to cover every home in the country but the last census – the 52-page bulky document in 2011 – missed out three-and-a-half million people. It cost almost half a billion pounds, a price the Treasury considers far too high. But the possibility of abolishing it in favour of information taken in part from controversial internet multinationals risks deep rows over privacy and David Cameron’s ostensibly close links with Google executives.

The company is suffering major damage to its reputation following is slowness to curb inappropriate content and its failure to pay more than minimal taxes in Britain.

There also remain questions over its close links to Mr Cameron, some of his aides, and other ministers (including Labour MPs).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been working out ways of replacing the census with ‘administrative data’ from NHS, tax and benefit records, the electoral register, school and university rolls and other public sources.

But officials are also eager to use information from the private sector. ONS documents have canvassed the idea of tapping into companies with databases each covering more than ten million people.

Firms mentioned include Tesco, the E.ON energy supplier, Thames Water, and Nationwide. The idea of using Google and other search engines to replace the census was raised in a document produced by the Government Statistical Service. Its objective is to look ‘Beyond 2011’, the Whitehall programme for finding an alternative to the traditional census.

Part of the document’s remit is to look at ‘alternative data sources’ which include sources like internet searches or transaction data and information collected and held by commercial organisations.

One example of how this could work is through Google Trends, a publicly-available website which shows the most popular searches broken down by subject and location.

It could be used to find data on migration by, for example, checking the number of searches for jobs in Britain made in Romania.

Google insists it would never sell third party information.

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