If you list the top 100 sites in the world (according to Alexa), you’ll find that 23 are owned by Google. That’s a massive share for a single company.
How does Google have such a huge presence? The main reason is the large number of localized versions of Google Search, such as Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.fr, Google.de, etc. Almost every country has one, and due to their popularity, 17 are among the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet.
Then there’s also YouTube, Blogger, etc.
The number is boosted a bit by a couple of “sites” that aren’t regular sites, googleusercontent.com being one. This is a side effect of how Alexa works, which seems to focus on domains accessed, so things like CDNs (content delivery networks) get included. This doesn’t change much, though, because even ignoring those domains you still end up with 20 proper, Google-owned sites. That’s one in five.
We noticed this rather impressive statistic the other day while working on a report about web server usage, and felt it was worth mentioning here.
There’s so much talk about how big Facebook has become (and deservedly so), but Google will be a tough giant to beat in terms of sheer web presence. It’s still one of the world’s most interesting companies.
P.S. A year ago we wrote a related article – How big is Google, really? – that you might want to check out for a deeper dive into Google’s enormous online presence.
Data source: Top sites from Alexa, May 14.
