Distinctive Features of the Argentinian Web

This article presents the most distinguishing features of the Argentinian web as found in a private sample of almost 10 million web pages from 150.000 sites collected in the early 2006. Particularly, we have studied page contents, link structure and technologies used in the construction of the sites. This study reveals a number of interesting facts: To begin with, there is a significant proportion (97.6%) of ".com.ar" domains with respect to other second level domains. As regards page contents, we have found a predominance of terms related to commercial activity while terms found in site names are mostly related to tourism. As for technologies, 48% of the pages from the sample are static and 52% dynamic, the latter being mostly built using free tools (like PHP). Besides, 76% of the sites are hosted in servers geographically located in Argentina. These two facts show there is an important web-related technological development and communication infrastructure in Argentina.