Highlights of web technology surveys, August 2010: Chinese websites now outnumber Spanish, Russian and FrenchSummary: Chinese is now language #4 on the Internet, #2 amongst the top 10,000 sites.
In our survey of website content languages, Chinese made a jump from #7 to #4 in the last month, now being ahead of Spanish, Russian and French, and only behind English, German and Japanese.
Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Chinese is already on rank #2 amongst the top 1,000 and the top 10,000 sites, only behind English, as shown in our ranking breakdown report.
From a more technical point of view, it is notable that about half of the Chinese websites use the .com top level domain, and only about one quarter use .cn, see our top level domain segmentation report. Also about half of the Chinese sites use the old GB2312 character encoding, while most of the rest uses UTF-8, and relatively few use the more modern GBK set, see character encoding segmentation report.
Chinese will perhaps never dethrone English as the most used language on websites, but it might very soon get ahead of German and Japanese to become number 2.
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