Google vs. Facebook: Which Is The Top Website?

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Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) are the most dominating websites worldwide except for Asia where domestic companies have managed to rule the market, according to a study. Google is the most visited website in most of Europe, North America and Oceanic countries while Facebook rules the Middle East, North Africa and primarily Spanish speaking countries in South America. Yahoo is dominating in Japan and Taiwan.Google vs. Facebook: Which Is The Top Website?

Researchers design video game-like map

Stefano De Sabbata and Dr. Mark Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute have designed a map that shows each country’s most popular website, and the design of the map is similar to the one used in Age of Empires video game series. The map has every country on it with the key at the bottom depicting websites featured.

“The map uses freely available data retrieved from Alexa on August 12th, 2013. The company has provided website analytics since 1996,” the researchers said, explaining their methodology on their Information Geographies blog.

The researchers explained that Alexa has gathered data from millions of internet users using 25000 different browser extensions, and the data used for designing this map is a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to a site and the estimated number of pageviews on that site from users in that country over the past month. The map has been designed as an old colonial map and is named after computer game title Age of Empires.

Each country marked with a unique color

The data is seen as a “choropleth map” and the dominant site in each country is indicated by a color. Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) is depicted with red and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) with blue, and these two are the most popular internet websites.

Alexa, however, does not reveal data for countries in sub-Saharan Africa. But most African countries where people use the internet are included in the map. These countries are Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, and South Africa dominated by Google while Ghana, Senegal, and Sudan have been taken by Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB).

The countries where Google is dominant contain half of the internet’s whole population, with over one billion users. Facebook was behind Chinese search engine Baidu in terms of total internet population.

Facebook leads in Southeast Asia

Earlier in a research from Neilson, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) was found to be the most dominating social media platform in terms of smartphone applications in Southeast Asia. Out of the top ten smartphone apps, Facebook ruled by becoming the most engaging smartphone in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. It held second position in Thailand behind the popular Japanese messaging app called LINE.

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