The prevalent language for communication on the Internet has been English. This may be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as the language’s role as a lingua franca. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the Latin alphabet. After English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (23%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic,
French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%)
.By region, 42% of the world’s Internet users are based in Asia, 24% in Europe, 14% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean taken together, 6% in Africa, 3% in the Middle East and 1% in Australia/Oceania. The Internet’s technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of Unicode, that good facilities are available for development and communication in the world’s widely used languages. However, some glitches such as
mojibake(incorrect display of some languages’ characters) still remain. Overall Internet usage has seen tremendous growth. From 2000 to 2009, the number of Internet users globally rose from 394 million to 1.858 billion. Well, what
websites are getting all these
viewers?
1. Google
Page rank: 1
Daily Pageviews: 8,322,375,115
Daily Visitors: 191,857,050
Country: USA
Net Worth: $5.5 Billion
Google Search or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services. The order of search results on Google’s search-results pages is based, in part, on a priority rank called a “PageRank”. Google Search provides many options for customized search, using Boolean operators such as: exclusion (“-xx”), inclusion (“+xx”), alternatives (“xx OR yy”), and wildcard (“x * x”). The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in Web pages, as opposed to other data, such as with Google Image Search. Google Search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. Google Search provides at least 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. There are special features for numbers, including ranges (70..73),prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions (“10.5 cm in inches”), calculations (“3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2″), package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation of displayed pages. In June 2011, Google introduced “Google Voice Search” and “Search by Image” features for allowing the users to search words by speaking and by giving images.
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2. Facebook
Page rank: 2
Daily Pageviews: 23,023,205,668
Daily Visitors: 168,117,950
Country: USA
Net Worth: $4.8 Billion
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register before using the site. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists, e.g. “People From Work”, or “Really Good Friends”. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the website.
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3. Youtube
Page rank: 3
Daily Pageviews: 7,621,914,928
Daily Visitors: 118,256,600
Country: USA
Net Worth: $3.4 Billion
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, share and view videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, BBC, VEVO, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.
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4. Yahoo
Page rank: 4
Daily Pageviews: 1,813,459,921
Daily Visitors: 94,128,650
Country: USA
Net Worth: $2.7 Billion
Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was as of December 2009, the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications. Originally, Yahoo! Search started as a web directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In the late 1990s, Yahoo! evolved into a full-fledged portal with a search interface and, by 2007, a limited version of selection-based search. Yahoo! Search, originally referred to as Yahoo! provided Search interface, would send queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of sites. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand. Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was done by Yahoo! itself. In 2001 the searchable index was powered by Inktomi and later was powered by Google until 2004, when Yahoo! Search became independent. On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.
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5. Baidu
Page rank: 5
Daily Pageviews: 3,079,134,653
Daily Visitors: 40,567,450
Country: China
Net Worth: $1.1 Billion
Baidu, Inc. simply known as Baidu and incorporated on January 18, 2000, is a Chinese web services company headquartered in the Baidu Campus in Haidian District, Beijing, People’s Republic of China. Baidu offers many services, including a Chinese language search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike, an online collaboratively-built encyclopedia, and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. Baidu was established in 2000 by co-founders, Robin Li and Eric Xu. Both of the co-founders are PRC nationals who studied and worked overseas before returning to China. In June 2011, Baidu ranked 5th overall in the Alexa Internet rankings. During Q4 of 2010, it is estimated that there were 4.02 billion search queries in China of which Baidu had a market share of 56.6%.China’s internet-search revenue share in second quarter 2011 by Baidu is 76% In December 2007, Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index. Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. Baidu offers multimedia content including MP3 music and movies, and is the first in China to offer Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and personal digital assistant (PDA) based mobile search.
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6. Wikipedia
Page rank: 6
Daily Pageviews: 313,997,828
Daily Visitors: 55,386,100
Country: USA
Net Worth: $1.5 Billion
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 19.7 million articles (over 3.7 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 90,000 regularly active contributors. As of July 2011, there are editions of Wikipedia in 282 languages.
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7. Blogger
Page rank: 7
Daily Pageviews: 624,202,064
Daily Visitors: 292,790,652
Country: USA
Net Worth: $1.4 Billion
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google’s own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via Custom URLs. In July of 2011 a news outlet announced that Google intends to change the name of the service from “Blogger” to “Google Blogs,” as part of a larger plan to re-brand or retire all non-Google brands in its portfolio of products and services.
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8. Windows Live
Page rank: 8
Daily Pageviews: 684,728,105
Daily Visitors: 45,464,650
Country: USA
Net Worth: $1.3 Billion
Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, part of their software plus services platform. A majority of these services are Web applications, accessible from a browser, but there are also client-side binary applications that require installation. There are three ways in which Windows Live services are offered: Windows Live Essentials applications, web services, and mobile services.
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9. Twitter
Page rank: 9
Daily Pageviews: 253,299,926
Daily Visitors: 39,766,650
Country: USA
Net Worth: $1.1 Billion
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as “tweets”. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet.” Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston, and New York City.
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10. QQ.com
Page rank: 10
Daily Pageviews: 1,092,194,208
Daily Visitors: 27,388,900
Country: China
Net Worth: $788 Million
Tencent QQ, generally referred to as QQ, is the most popular free instant messaging computer program in mainland China. As of July 11, 2011, the active QQ users accounts for QQ IM totaled 812.3 million,possibly making it the world’s second largest online community. The number of simultaneous online QQ accounts exceeded 100 million.
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