Popularity of Google in Africa

The World Wide Web resembles its moniker more and more each day. While the Internet has spread quickly in western countries, its roll out has been much slower in other areas of the world, especially Africa. Fortunately, global Internet giants like Google are able to take advantage of some of the expanding African web infrastructure provided by companies like SEACOM.

Each country is assigned a Top Level Domain (TLD) by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. You're probably most familiar with TLD country codes like .us for the United States and .uk for the United Kingdom. What you might not know is that your favorite link shortener bit.ly uses the Libyan TLD .ly.

Google, in their infinite wisdom, wealth and power have provided customized Google search pages for almost all the countries in the world. I decided to look at the popularity of the African TLD Google pages. I was able to find pages for almost every African country. Often, the extension includes .co before the country code such as www.google.co.bw for Botswana.

I used Alexa, the Internet traffic reporting site, to get the site rank for each Google country TLD available. I've included the results a few different ways. First, the map below breaks down countries into eight categories based on the Alexa rankings. The African countries rank between the 138th most viewed site on the Internet, Google Egypt, and number 524,835, Google Central African Republic. At last check Worldgeoblog.com was in the 5 millions ;) I've also included links to each of the sites that are ranked below the map. Last, I'm providing the kml file which includes Country Name, Alexa rank and URL.



Algeria
Angola
Benin
Botswana
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Congo (Brazzaville)
Congo (Kinshasa)
Côte d'Ivoire
Djibouti
Egypt
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gabon
Gambia
Ghana
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Kenya
Lesotho
Liberia
Libya
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mauritius
Morocco
Mozambique
Namibia
Niger
Nigeria
Rwanda
Sao Tome and Principe
Senegal
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Somaliland
South Africa
Sudan
Swaziland
Tanzania
Togo
Tunisia
Uganda
Western Sahara
Zambia
Zimbabwe