Google becomes world’s popular website

Google has been adjudged the world’s most popular website or search engine dominating across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and in parts of Africa and Asia, according to a study.

YouTube and Facebook are the next most popular sites according to Alexa.com and published by the World Economic Forum, available to the Ghana News Agency.

The top sites lists are calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past month. The site with the highest combination of visitors and page views is ranked in the first place.

According to the website China’s Baidu placed fourth because it has the world’s largest internet user population – 731 million as of December 2016.

Wikipedia and Yahoo are next, and the Indian version of Google is in seventh place. This highlights the fact that the majority of internet use is driven by the search for information.

Reddit, the American social news aggregator, is in eighth place for its interest in news with over half of its users from the US, the Britain, Canada, Australia and Germany.

Chinese instant messaging site QQ is in ninth place and Taobao in 10th. While most visitors are in China (89.3 per cent), the sites also attract users from Japan, South Korea, the US and Hong Kong.

Among the top 10, people spend the most time (14 minutes and five seconds) on Reddit, and the least amount on Wikipedia, at four minutes 26 seconds per day.

Meanwhile, there were 345 million internet users in Africa with an estimated population of 1.2 billion as of March 31, 2017, according to Internet World Statistics.

It said internet uses in the rest of the world stood at 3.3 billion with Africa constituting 9.3 per cent.

Ghana, however, recorded 7.9 internet users, posting 27.8 per cent of its population estimate of 28 million, within the same period.

Source: GNA