Highlights of web technology surveys, March 2010, China's web presence rising fastSummary: China is now the third most frequent country-specific top level domain amongst the top 1 million websites, ahead of Japan and UK. The most interesting change this month in all our surveys is in the top level domain trend survey. We see .cn, the Chinese top level domain, gaining very quickly, passing UK and Japan in the last two months. China is now the third country domain after Germany and Russia (and behind the generic .com, .net and .org domains). If the current trend of Germany losing and China gaining continues at this pace, we could see China on top of the country domains within a year or so.
A similar trend, confirming that observation, can be found in the character encoding distribution. The Chinese character set GB2312 is gaining, while most "western" character sets, e.g. ISO-8859-1, are losing. This is remarkable, because at the same time websites are switch from GB2312 to UTF-8. This means that GB2312 is gaining only due to new Chinese sites entering the top 1 million sites (which our surveys are based on) and despite the fact that webmasters tend to switch to the more international Unicode set.
Another trend I would like to emphasize is not related to China, it is the ever increasing market share of Nginx in the web server trend survey. Nginx is steadily gaining in the last few months. We can see in the technology change survey, that it is gaining primarily from Apache, not so much from Microsoft-IIS. It is also gaining from other "alternative" web servers, such as Lighttpd. Nginx is changing from a niche product into a mainstream technology.
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