The Geographical Life of Search

This article describes a geographical study on the usage of a search engine, focusing on the traffic details at the level of countries and continents. The main objective is to understand from a geographic point of view, how the needs of the users are satisfied, taking into account the geographic location of the host in which the search originates, and the host that contains the Web page that was selected by the user in the answers. Our results confirm that the Web is a cultural mirror of society and shed light on the implicit social network behind search. These results are also useful as input for the design of distributed search engines.