5. Who is Looking?

By analyzing the domain names associated with each hit on the Algorithm Repository, we can see who is interested in algorithms. Table 5 records the number of hits by top-level domain. I believe that more hits were recorded by industrial users than educational ones, since the .com (82387) and .net (49172) domains together account for almost three times the number of .edu (46234) hits, although of course many students also have accounts with internet providers.

 

Table 5: Hits by top level domain

domain	.com	.edu	.gov	.mil	.net	.org	[0-9]*	countries	totals
hits	82387	46234	2022	1682	49172	1273	70002	47518	300290

It is interesting and amusing to see the distribution of hits by country code. No less than 100 nations visited the Algorithm Repository during this one year interval, suggesting a much broader interest in algorithms than I would have thought. Hit count per nation is summarized in Table 8.

The most algorithmically inclined nation after the United States (presumably the source of most .com and .edu hits) was Germany (6099). The United Kingdom (3795), France (2811), and Spain (2501) each accounted for significantly more hits than Israel (1265), Japan (1668), and the Netherlands (1223) - suggesting that the interest does not completely correlate with my perception of the amount of algorithmic research activity in these nations. Ireland, which finished ninth in the survey of Crescenzi and Kann [#!CK-98!#], ranked 40th among nations in ours. Two of the largest producers of graduate students in computer science, China (66) and India (230), ranked surprisingly low in the number of hits despite the presence of substantial software industries. Presumably this reflects limited WWW access within these countries.