A few years ago, Altavista was the leading search engine in France. Immediately after Google launched its search engine there, people left Altavista to try this new and simple search engine, and didn’t turn back. Altavista was indeed becoming full of spammy pages and people were just annoyed with that.
A study made by French agency Xiti shows that Google’s market share is now close to 90% in this country, followed by Yahoo, MSN, Free etc whose market share has been going down for the last few years.
I don’t know what we should say about these figures? Should we be scared or happy?
Scared! How on earth could any one else compete, even if they had a stronger product, given such a strong brand?
As a french SEO consultant I wish the local search engine market could be more balanced. I remember some years ago, it was much better when 3-4 search engines were competing : it was acceptable to have mean results in one search engine while performing one others. Now, websites are Google dependant.
I not really surprised with the results. Google is way better than altavista I never use this search engine. It just show that the french have taste despite what other people say, at least when it come to search engines!
This information does not show the top search engines *in France*, but the top *French search engines*. These numbers include all of French-speaking Canada, for example.
Here’s the original post – http://www.xitimonitor.com/en-us/search-engines-barometer/search-engines-barometer-july-2007/index-1-2-6-104.html
Still the numbers are staggering.
Does anyone see another Search Engine challenging Google in the foreseable future?
My guess not – but Altavista went from Top Dog to zilch in just a few years
I feel the SEO market will now be ruled by Multilingual Website design and development for online search engine in French, German, Japanese, Chinese, etc…
I do website optimization for 14 languages and we use all human translator, I have noticed there are several SEO who use software tools for translation and the result is horrible, some times the client also is not able to realize what he is posting on his website, I guess SEO need to make sure they use Human translators, unfortunately even Google Translator is not up to mark for Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
Regards,
Rick Modi
http://www.techpubinc.com
Tech Publication Inc