What Are the Browsing Preferences of World Online Population? an Examination of the Differences among Top-ranked E-business Websites from Different Countries.

Abstract

World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth during the past two decades. One reason for this wide acceptance is because the Internet allows individuals to reach out to the entire world beyond their localities. As a result two opposing forces are at work in the cyberspace. On the one hand the Internet enables individuals or regional groups to express their cultural uniqueness to the rest of the world more easily, but at the same time it also creates a unifying influence on all online audience regardless of their country of origin. To understand the relative strength of this homogenizing and diversifying influence, this paper examines the top-ranking websites from different regions of the world to discover to what extent online audiences from different regions of the world shows common and/or distinctive browsing preferences.