## 2 Methodology
### Country of Origin Evaluation  
The cornerstone of this research methodology was the country detection algorithm that was developed. It aimed to process all relevant information collected and recorded in the database by the Web data extraction algorithm with the purpose of inferring the country most closely related to each specific.eu domain. The country detection algorithm evaluated the information collected on the basis of how indicative each piece of data was to discovering the country of origin of an.eu domain using a point system. Four different weights were devised and assigned a specific point value. These weights are as follows:  
* Marginally relevant information: 4 points
* Relevant information: 9 points
* Important information: 19 points  
Figure 4: Flowchart of the Web data extraction algorithm. * Very important information: 29 points The point values of each weight were purposefully selected not to be round numbers in order to minimize the chance for ties. Despite that, ties did still occur and a special tie breaking subroutine that will be detailed further below was developed. The information regarding where each website is hosted is difficult to evaluate because some EU countries boast a huge number of data-centers while others much less so. That means that when a website is hosted in a country with many data centers it is less relevant than if the website were hosted in a country with fewer. After consulting with the number of data centers per EU country [34], it was decided that the information that a website is hosted in Germany, Netherlands, or France was considered marginally relevant, the information that a website is hosted in Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Portugal, or Czechia was considered relevant and the information that a website is hosted in any other EU country was considered important. The fact that the same SLD might be registered and functioning in other EU country ccTLDs besides.eu was considered relevant since oftentimes individuals, businesses, or institutions decide to offer their content in multiple TLDs in order to increase reach. The fact that these other SLDs might belong to completely different entities discouraged the researchers from considering this information more important. The ccTLD of the website's registrar was considered of marginal relevance. It might hold a clue as to whether a specific registrar purposefully tries to associate their services with a specific national identity but the registrar's clients, which are the owners of the domains we are investigating, might chose the specific registrar for different reasons. All ccTLDs collected from a single website under investigation, whether in the homepage or other pages, were tallied. If a specific country's emails were encountered 1 to 5 times, this information was deemed important, while if a specific country's emails were encountered more than 5 times this information became very important. Deciding to include multiple email links to domains using a specific ccTLD different from.eu is a strong indicator of relevancy to that specific country. The same reasoning was followed for phone numbers collected from tel: links, only in this case even the appearance of 1 to 5 such links was deemed very important. Telephone links not only indicate intention to relate to a specific country but actually confirm physical presence of the entity owning the.eu domain in that specific country. The relevancy of the information regarding an EU country's name that appeared in full text in English in the homepage or any other sub-page with map links was judged on the basis of the frequency of appearance. Any country that appeared only once was considered marginally relevant, countries that appeared more than once but less than five times were considered relevant and countries that appeared more than five times were considered important. The amount of times a country is repeatedly mentioned in the text of a domain often implies a strong relation with that country.