If you are like me you probably find yourself surfing the web numerous times throughout the day. Whether it is on my laptop, Ipad, or Iphone I seem to always be connected. It is so convenient to whip out an Iphone to search for the answer to a question, or pull up Pandora while at work to listen to music. This obsession with connectivity is not only isolated to America, it is a global obsession. In this global obsession there are several major players, the sites that everyone seems to visit on a regular basis. A quick examination of my browser history showed that for me: Google, Yahoo, ESPN, and IMDB rank among my most visited sites. However, I am a twenty something American male, do any of my most visited sites stand-up on a global scale? To find an answer to this question I turned to...you guessed it...the internet. What I found was a delightful visual created by the Alexa Company that displays a political map of the globe and the most visited website for each country. Some of the sites will come as no surprise. Google and Facebook are numbers one and two with 62 and 50 countries respectively. After these juggernauts the list takes a drastic drop in both global influence and popularity in America. With Baidu(2), Yahoo(2), Al-Watan Voice(1), Mail.ru(1), VK(1), and Yandex(1) making up that lower tier the only site I have ever heard of much less used is Yahoo. The other sites are all largely entrenched in their native countries with Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China. Overall, the map is a fascinating testament to the global dominance of Google and Facebook and also the unwillingness of much of Asia to adopt western culture even in a globalized world.
You can view the map and read what Alexa Company has to say about it at this link:
http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/2013/09/age-of-internet-empires/
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