What websites are Americans, from Canada to Argentina, visiting? AQ found some surprising regional

and country variations, and some up-and-comers. As you would expect, most of the ones that come out

on top are household names throughout the world: search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and

Yahoo!, as well as Facebook, You Tube and Wikipedia. But beyond those, web surfers in different coun-

tries demonstrate some interesting tastes, including for locally-generated sites. numbers just the

Tucarro.com One of the most popular sites in Venezuela. Launched in 1998, it’s a site for buying and selling cars (as the name indicates). According to its owner, Classified Media Group, 80 percent of the cars listed on the site are sold. With the success of tucarro.com, several other sites followed: tumoto.com, tuinmueble.com, tulancha.com, and tuavion.com—all with the same idea.

There are a couple up-and-coming social networking sites in Latin America—not all of them based there. Among the most popular: hi5.com, MetroFlog.com, Sonico.com, and OrKut.com.

Kaijiji.com A centralized network of online communities for posting classified ads has become Canada’s answer to Craigslist and receives over 45 million unique visitors per month, making it Canada’s number one online classified site.

News sites are among the top- 20 most-visited sites in a number of countries in the region. Clarin.com, in Argentina, is the most visited Spanish-language newspaper on the Internet.

The only country where a website that includes more “intimate”

information, poringa.net, makes the top- 20 list… Argentina. Maybe that’s just because it’s linked to the more modest Argentine-based file-sharing site Taringa.net. Yeah, right.

Fotolog.com Although created in 2002 by U. S. entrepreneur Scott Heiferman, the majority of the file sharing site’s users come from South America. Chile claims the most accounts ( 4,827,387), Argentina second ( 4,225, 102), and Brazil third ( 1,443,474).

136 Americas Quarterly FALL 2009