On the one hand, new data makes it surprising that Google doesn’t cater more to the French market. On the other hand, perhaps the search giant doesn’t need to – in France, it already has a market share of almost 90 percent.
89.98 – that’s the exact figure for August, according to XiTi and Alt Search Engines. Since Google won over 89.79 percent of the French market in July, that means Google’s liable to hit 90.00 at any given moment. And that means Google’s opponents are in serious trouble.
After all, we’ve nearly reached the “nine out of ten people prefer Google” point, and most of us can admit that at least one person in any group that size is bound to be asleep, stupid, or, in the tradition of an old Trident commercial, being bitten by squirrels.
Still, Yahoo might take some comfort in the fact that it’s in second place (with a market share of 3.17 percent). MSN is next (with 2.33 percent), followed by Orange (with 1.82 percent). Would-be challenger Quaero remains nowhere to be seen.
It’s going to take quite a lot for anything to overthrow Google as France’s top search engine. At the rate things are going, it actually seems more likely that Google will hit 100 percent than plummet to 49.
