The Geographical Life of
Search
Ricardo Baeza-Yates(1), Christian Middleton(2), Carlos
Castillo(1)
(1)
Yahoo! Research; Barcelona, Spain
(2)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Barcelona, Spain

Contents
 Introduction
 Experimental Framework
 Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD)
 Country Top-Level Domains (ccTLD)
 Internal Search Traffic of a Country
 Traffic Among Continents and Countries
 Geographic Dynamics
 Conclusions

Introduction
 Three-fold
goals
a) Understand how search engines are used
from a geographic point of view
b) Search process implies a social network,
and geographical user behavior gives
information of this network and how the
Web reflects society
c) Search traffic among countries is
interesting for the development of
distributed search engines

Introduction
 Main objective
“Describe how users behave, based on their
location and clicked URL”
 Explainfrom where a user need comes and
where it is resolved
 Implies traffic of information and transactions

Experimental Framework
• Top-Level Domains (TLD)
– Generic (gTLD) -- .org, .com, .edu, …
– Country Code (ccTLD) -- .cl, .es, .fr, …
• Query log
– 840M clicked queries from Yahoo! log (2008)
– Eliminated 0.01% of inter-country traffic
– 593K unique gTLD hosts
– 166K unique ccTLD hosts

Generic TLD (gTLD)
 Traffic contribution to .com
 Most countries have 65% traffic to .com (least is >45%)
 Some countries have significant servers on .com:
◦ Canada, Spain, Great Britain

Generic TLD (gTLD)
Traffic to other gTLD

Generic TLD (gTLD)
 Which countries host gTLDs?
 US is Top-1 on all domains
 .gov & .edu are highly concentrated (use of secondary level)
 .biz, .net, .mil are geographically spread

Server Location – Vanity
TLDs
 Vanity Score  Hostingprobability
◦ Non-uniform
◦ Median 0.66

Internal search traffic of
country
“Visits to pages in which both the searcher and
the clicked page are in the same country.”
 Ratio of internal destination:
 Ratio of traffic from internal sources:

Internal search traffic of
country
 Sites on domain only
 People only interested on relevant to people from that
sites from their country. country.

Traffic to ccTLD
◦ At least 4% of outgoing traffic
◦ Omitted 60 countries with internal traffic
◦ Significance of .uk and .ru

Source & destination
Entropy
 Sources entropy  Destination entropy

Intra-country & Incoming
Entropy
 Inverse correlation (r = -0.772)
“when ccTLD has narrow set of traffic sources, country is
one of the most important sources”

Traffic amongst Continents
 .uk visited from
Europe,
Oceania, and
Africa
 Diversified
traffic in South
America
 .es sites highly
influent in
South America

Traffic Similarity
 Linguistic/geograp
hic characteristics:
a) Indo-European
b) French
c) Dutch
d) Swazi
e) Tetum
f) English

Traffic Similarity
 Analyzed 24 demographic features
 Laplacian Eigenmaps over country similarity graph
◦ Feature x such that minimizes:
 Most relevant features:
◦ Oil consumption
◦ Latitude of center of country
◦ Human Development Index (HDI)
◦ Number of mobile phones
◦ Total area

Similarity between
Continents

Geographic Dynamics
 Compared with 2005 Yahoo! Log
 Similar traffic to gTLDs, and location of servers
hosting gTLDs.
 In2005, European ccTLDs had more diversified
sources, while in 2008 it was the Asian ccTLDs.
 Demographic features:
◦ Latitude, HDI, unemployment rate, migration, and area
of country.
t This confirms our observation that countries sharing
latitude or human development have similar traffic.

Conclusions
 Analyzed data from large query log to describe the
way the user behaves based on their location and
the URL clicked.
 Findings:
◦ .com has the largest share of traffic
t Most hosts are located in US
◦ Inverse correlation between incoming traffic
entropy and internal referral ratio.
◦ Traffic among countries is concentrated in few
domains (.uk, .ru) – linguistic & cultural
◦ At a continent level, .uk is the most common
domain among continents.

Conclusions
 Findings:
◦ Users located in North America, Europe,
Asia, and Africa visit similar set of domains.
◦ Users in South America and Oceania show
different behavior.
◦ Results show that language can be more
important than geography, based on search
similarity.
◦ From demographics analysis, we observed that
countries in similar latitudes or with similar
HDI share traffic destinations.

The Geographical Life of
Search
Ricardo Baeza-Yates(1), Christian Middleton(2), Carlos
Castillo(1)
(1)
Yahoo! Research; Barcelona, Spain
(2)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Barcelona, Spain