French Search Market Nearly Monopolised By Google

August 17th, 2007

An 89.7% market share reach makes Google a near monopoly in the French search engine market. In spite of numerous attempts by the government and the EU council to combat Google’s meteoric rise in popularity, the search engine has conquered the population of France more effectively than any other market.

Yahoo! trails far, far behind at a distant second place with 3.14% market share, followed by MSN at 2.48%, Orange at 1.89% and Free.fr at 0.72%. The remaining 1.99% is distributed among many smaller search engines as well as the likes of AOL, Ask, AltaVista and Lycos.

The research published by XitiMonitor, a French web survey Institute, was based on a study of 84,108 websites during the period July 1 to 31, 2007.

La Toile du Québec, a small and relatively unknown search engine saw the greatest gain, in terms of percentage change in number of visitors. MSN visitors grew 7.7% making it the second fastest growing search engine, followed by Orange with 4.3% growth and Ask with 2.5% growth. Google’s actual visitor numbers grew only 0.3%.

The full report with graphs showing French search engine market share and charting growth trends among search engines in France during 2006-2007 can be viewed on the XitiMonitor site:

XitiMonitor Search Engine Barometer

Tags: accuracast, search, news