Google Research

A World Wide View of Browsing the World Wide Web

  • Aurore Fass
  • Caitlin Sadowski
  • Emma Thomas
  • Jon Azose
  • Kimberly Ruth
  • Mark Pearson
  • Zakir Durumeric
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), ACM (2022) (to appear)

Abstract

In this paper, we perform the first large-scale study of how people use and spend time on the web. Our study is based on anonymous, aggregated telemetry data from a major web browser with several hundred million users globally. Our study considers only users who chose to explicitly enable sharing URLs with the browser vendor and have usage statistic reporting enabled. We analyze the distribution of web traffic, the types of popular sites that people visit and spend the most time on, differences between desktop and mobile browsing behavior, geographical differences in web usage, and the websites popular in regions worldwide. Our study sheds light on both online user behavior and how the measurement community can better analyze the web in future research studies.

Learn more about how we do research

We maintain a portfolio of research projects, providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work