14 DAY TRIAL // The web is huge and growing all the time. Despite this, only a handful of sites account for most of the things we do online. Using data from Alexa, not the most accurate thing out there but probably the best we've got, a couple of Oxford Internet Institute researchers have put together a map of the world based on the most popular sites in each country.
The gimmick is that each country is given surface on the map based on the number of internet users it has. The striking thing about the map, though hardly surprising, is how uniform it is.
In most of the world, certainly the Western part, Google dominates as the biggest site on the web. It's the most popular in Europe and North America, with the exception of very few countries, and is also the most popular in Brazil, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Nigeria, countries with a large internet population.
But Facebook manages to be the most popular in some places, Mexico and Norway, a few places in Africa and South America and the Philippines. Yahoo manages to score one important win, in Japan. But Yahoo Japan has little to do with the US company.
You'll notice though a big green blob on the map, attributed to Baidu, the popular Chinese search engine. China already has the biggest online population in the world, so even if it's just one country, Baidu is actually the number one site for more people than Facebook all over the world.
A few more outliers are in Russia and Russian-speaking countries. Yandex dominates in Russia, but Mail.ru is the most popular in Khazakstan and VKontakte in Belarus. There are plenty of caveats with this map, as it's based on a current website ranking from Alexa, but it uses internet population figures from previous years.