A map of the world according to the most popular websites

An estimated 3.5bn people use the internet per year, and access to the web has become so essential that it can affect a person’s quality of life.

There is a wealth of information about which countries have the quickest Wi-Fi connection (South Korea) and countries with the most web censorship (North Korea).

How about the most popular websites?

Alexa rankings disclose the most popular websites in the world, and indy100 rendered the data into the form of a map:

Picture: Louis Doré/Carto

Search engine giant Google is by far the most popular website in the world: countries from Sri Lanka; Zimbabwe, Thailand and Turkey to the UK all use it most frequently.

Interestingly, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Cambodia and Algeria all use video website YouTube the most of any domain.

Russia's favourite is the social networking service VK, although Vladimir Putin has a heavy hand when it comes to censorship and last year threatened to block Wikipedia over its page about a type of cannabis.

Meanwhile, Malta (if you squint) seems to love their newspaper the Times of Malta, and the same goes for Palestine with Alwatan Voice and Albania with the Gazeta Express​.

China's favourite domain is the search engine, Baidu, while Vietnam's is CocCoc.

There are a number of countries coloured in black which Alexa has no data for.

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