Spanish Search Market

Anyone in the know?

[Michael Anthony]

I've been asked to look at an aff program targetting the Spanish Market (Mainland Spain, not Spanish-speaking nations) and am interested in establishing which search engines are popular there.

I don't need actual volume or market share numbers, although these would be helpful, but am more interested in simply knowing that web promotion is viable for businesses there.

Many thanks in advance,

Michael

[ThomasB]

Michael, the Nielsen numbers [nielsen-netratings.com] for Spain are the best I could find.
I talked to a spanish SEO a while back and he said that MSN and Google are roughly equal, followed by Terra, Yahoo! and Wannadoo. That was at PubCon 5 I think, just pulled out my notes. Dunno if that's still applicable. But as far as I can remember there was no dominating player in Spain.

[Rumbas]

Your numbers seem about right Thomas, at least compared to an older report from Nielsen/Netratings from Sept 2003 [searchenginewatch.com]

MSN 35.6%
Google 30.2%

I'm aware that 2003 is a long time ago, but a good hint in the right direction for sure.

[WebWalla]

Just to give a different slant on this, the AIMC (Translation: Association for the Investigation of Communication Media) held their 7th annual poll on Internet use late last year. 53 thousand Spanish Internet users participated and these were the top search engines or directories mentioned, with percentage figures:-

1 www.google.es 43.2
2 www.yahoo.es 17.3
3 www.terra.es 7.0
4 www.altavista.com 5.2
5 www.msn.es 5.0
6 Lycos (1) 2.6
7 www.wanadoo.es 1.6
8 www.ya.com 1.6
9 www.alltheweb.com 1.1
10 www.hotmail.com 1.1
11 www.ozu.es 0.5
12 Astalavista (2) 0.5
13 www.hispavista.com 0.4
14 www.paginasamarillas.es 0.3

(1) Includes "generic Lycos" (?), Lycos.es and Lycos.com
(2) Includes "generic astalavista" (?), astalavista.com and astalavista.box.sk

For those that read Spanish, there's a downloadable pdf on the AIMC website.

Having lived in Spain since 1988, I personally doubt that MSN has the same market share as Google - my own impression is that Google's share is much nearer the 75% mark.

[tbear]

Like WebWalla I came to Spain in 1988 and would agree with his figures.....
Not keen on the AIMC website though........ LOL

[Michael Anthony]

Thank you all for the excellent replies - I'll keep you posted and share anything new I learn in the process.