TECH NEWS – Wow: the Alphabet search engine: Google was not the most visited website in 2021, which is a significant surprise; Google has been dethroned.

Through its radar service, Cloudflare can measure which websites people go to the most. They have produced an annual summary evaluation, found here. It’s best to let the top 10 list do the talking for us:

Top 10 most popular domains, end of 2021:

1.         TikTok.com
2.         Google.com
3.         Facebook.com
4.         Microsoft.com
5.         Apple.com
6.         Amazon.com
7.         Netflix.com
8.         YouTube.com
9.         Twitter.com
10. WhatsApp.com

Yep: the Chinese-owned TikTok has finished ahead of Google and Facebook! It is a staggering achievement for a video and music platform, although it should be pointed out that the pandemic has played a vital role in the site’s rise. Still, it’s a considerable achievement that the big tech companies (Microsoft and Apple) didn’t make the podium. Still, Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp are the must-haves in the second half of the list. But compare this with last year’s list…

Top 10 most popular domains, end of 2020:

1.         Google.com
2.         Facebook.com
3.         Microsoft.com
4.         Apple.com
5.         Netflix.com
6.         Amazon.com
7.         TikTok.com
8.         YouTube.com
9.         Instagram.com
10.        Twitter.com

Here, Cloudflare highlighted that Amazon was 5th last November. Still, Netflix overtook it in December (even moving up to 4th from time to time), and Instagram and Twitter kept swapping positions with each other. But look at TikTok’s ranking: it was only SEVENTH! The order from Google to Apple has remained unchanged this year.

The site started to take the lead from August 10 steadily, Cloudflare reports, but in February, March and May, it overtook Google a few times. In September, TikTok said that it had one billion monthly active users, making it the most downloaded app on mobile devices (including both iOS and Android!), ahead of Facebook. And on Thanksgiving and Black Friday (November 25-26), TikTok was the stable leader.

Cloudflare did mention that “the ranking is derived from our public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 and so it’s not related to the number of unique users or visitors it gets per month”, so the picture is not entirely clear. The reality may be different.

Source: WCCFTech