Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

Like many countries in Europe, the most important search engine in France is Google by a rather significant margin.  It is interesting to note that some estimates suggest that Google produces over 80% of all search engine visitors in France.

The French search engine marketing sector is growing very rapidly, but from a much smaller base than say Scandinavia or the United Kingdom.  One of the factors influencing this is that the French had an electronic telephone directory called ‘Minitel’ quite some time before the Internet was being used in other countries.  This delayed the uptake of the web and French search engines putting France behind other major western countries.

However, the use of the internet in France is taking off very rapidly indeed and it’s not a market to be ignored.

The top three International search engines in France are:

Google

MSN / Live Search

Yahoo

Other top search engines in France include:

• AOL
• Voila
• Orange
• Free
• Alice
• Lycos

comScore: Google Sites maintained its position as the top Web property in France with 20.1 million visitors, reaching 70 percent of the online population. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 18.1 million visitors, followed by Orange Sites with 14.9 million visitors and Iliad/Free.fr Sites with 12.6 million visitors.

*Ranking based on the top 25 French properties in December 2007.
** Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Each time I check those reports - usually every 3 months - I am saying to myself : “Will it have lowered a little ?”. This time, like all the other times other, the answer is still “NO”.

Google market share in France is high, when I mean high, I mean sky high, astonishingly high … or whatever term you prefer to qualify a 90% market share (in visits, according to Xiti, a french web stats tool provider - based on 80K websites). The second one, Yahoo !, is only at … 3,2% and the first local company, Orange (biggest ISP in France), has a market share of 1,63%

And this figure is still rising (+ 1% over a year).

Google was the most visited property in France, with 19.2 million unique visitors age 15 or older, reaching 69 percent of the total French Internet audience. It was followed by Microsoft Sites which attracted 17.7 million unique visitors, a 64 percent reach. The fastest growing of the top ten properties was multi-channel retailer, Groupe PPR, owner of sites such as Laredoute.fr and Fnac.com. The property grew 10 percent from September, attracting 9.7 million unique visitors in October, a reach of 35 percent of the Internet users in France. Source: comScore

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs