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Draws upon Hofstede's cultural values and Rogers' diffusion of innovations to investigate relationships between search engine popularity and a company's preference for global versus local online branding.

Investigates the global versus local domain name selection strategies and web site popularity of multinational corporations based on their organizational characteristics and Hofstede's cultural values of their host countries.

Organizational size, industry and two cultural values – individualism and masculinity – relate to how companies adopt innovations, in this case selecting and promoting a global or local online identity. For their web presence, most Fortune Global 500 companies use the global.com domain rather than a local country domain. The results also suggest a virtual divide in online visibility, favoring.com companies over companies using country …