As some of you might know, I run an academic site called Essays.se. This is a website where students from all over the world can search for and download full-text university essays from Sweden. The visitors come from from 209 countries in total, even as far away places as Burundi and Haiti.
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post looking closer at some of the visitor data. What I found interesting was that there were almost as many visitors from India as from the US. Moreover, the search terms from India were much more academic. Here is what the geographical visitor distribution looked like in november 2008:
Read the full blog post here. As I said, if I would bet my money on a country, it would be India. My visitor data indicate that these people are getting an education, something that will surely pay off in the coming decades.
Now, here is an update on what the geographical data looks like now, about a year later.
Pretty exciting, right? India has surpassed the US and the United Kingom. Essays.se now has twice as many visitors from India as from the US. It's hard to see on the map, but the Philippines, Pakistan and Malaysia are coming strongly too, occupying place 4, 5 and 6 on the country top list.
These are the top search queries from India, at the moment.
- world peace and security
- water pollution in india
- women empowerment
- recent trends in information technology
- pollution
- impact of technology on research
- conclusion of water pollution
- electrical engineering projects
- causes of poverty in india
- gender discrimination in india
- management thesis topics
- global recession 2009
- conservation of trees
- environmental pollution
- recent trends in it
- role of women in india
- women's role in history
Now, there's a lot more exciting geographical data, but I'll stop there. Read the old post, if you want more.
But I will also give some bonus data to all of you who are interested in web development. Let's take a look at India versus Sweden, beginning with screen resolution:
Sweden: About 19% of visitors have screen that is 1024 pixels wide. Mostly everyone else has a sceen that is even wider. And only a fraction of a percentage use screens of 800x600 resolution.
Conclusion: There is no longer a need to design for 800x600 screens in Sweden. And it makes a lot of sense to make extra considerations for people with screens wider than 1024. There is some extra screen space there, that we can use.
India: Almost 9% still use a screen of 800x600 resolution. 47% use a screen that is 1024 pixels wide. Conclusion: When designing "for the world" it still makes sense to make considerations for people with 800x600 screens.
Now, let's look at the operations system used by visitors from India and Sweden.
Sweden: About 92% of visitors are using Windows and 7% are using a Mac. Then, after Linux, the Iphone users clearly show up in the statistics, which is pretty cool.
India: About 99% of visitors are using Windows, and about 0,5% are using Mac and Linux, respectively. And that's about it. There are some mobile phone visits but they are basically on the error margin.
I don't know what conclusion to make about that, though. What do you think? Buy stocks in Apple...? Or Microsoft perhaps?
Posts
4 comments :
This is so cool! It's time we give some real thought to _why_ India is on the move like this.
Hmm, interesting. All of it.
I had no idea equality was such a big trend in India, but considering the problems for many women and the history of the caste system I guess it makes sense. And considering the historic strength of Swedish equality movement I guess there is an opportunity for entrepreneurship here. :)
Very interesting. India and perhaps not China is on the move on Internet?
The comparison with China is perhaps a bit difficult to make. All the countries on the toplist have large english-speaking populations.
Post a Comment