# Many Chinese web sites on global top 1000 list


I just came across a new [list of the 1000 most visited websites
globally,](http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/) hosted by
Google's AdPlanner. There isn't too much information about how the list
was put together, although it's noted that certain pages that are not
open to the world, spam sites, and porn sites have been removed (it
would have been interesting to see how high up the various porn sites
would rank). Although all such measures have an element of error, Google
should have a fairly good understanding of the world's internet, and
people buying ads need to know very precisely how many users a given web
page has, so I would assume that this list is fairly accurate.

Just looking at the top 50 websites, it is very impressive how many
Chinese sites are listed! The first few are all English (with Wikipedia
as number four, after Facebook, Yahoo and Live). The first Chinese
website is Baidu, at number 8, immediately followed by QQ (a Chinese
chat client). The third country to appear is in spot 25, with the
Japanese version of Yahoo. If you go through the top 50, there are 32
English websites, 15 Chinese and 3 Japanese. If you continue down the
next 50 posts, there are more English and Chinese sites, a few Japanese
and Korean, and one or two Brazilian and Russian entries.

Indeed, you get the sense that the two super-languages of the World Wide
Web are English and Chinese, without any competition. And this makes
sense. I was talking to a friend today about demographics, and how India
is gaining on China (Wikipedia currently gives China as 1,34 billion and
India as 1,18 billion). I asked him what the next country was: the US,
with 309 million! Quite a big gap! And of course, although technology
growth in India is impressive, none of the Indian languages have much of
a presence on the Internet at all.

It's also important to keep in mind that this list measures top web
sites, this isn't necessarily a good proxy for how much content is
available in that language. Some of the sites listed are actually Web
2.0 sites that host content in many languages (I counted Twitter as an
"English" webpage, but of course, people tweet in hundreds of languages.
The same for Blogger, and even Facebook, etc). Instead of using Blogger,
everyone could host material on their own domain (like I do with
reganmian.net), which would result in no site from that country being
listed on the Top 1000 List.

This is also the reason why Spanish, which according to Wikipedia is the
first language of 330-400 million people, has no site among the top 50:
It's scattered over so many countries. Although it's (mostly) the same
language, people still use the newspapers and blog engines of their own
countries. There is no surprise that all the secondary languages I
mentioned above: Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Korean – are all the
national languages of very large countries. If Brazil had been split
into lot's of small South-American countries, with their own individual
politics and celebrities, etc, we might not find any Portuguese site on
the top list.

This list is important, because many top lists made by Western companies
systematically under-represent content not in English (for example
[Technorati's list of top 25 blogs](http://technorati.com/blogs/top100),
which are somehow all based in the US). These give North Americans the
idea that most of the web speaks English, and that there is no point in
learning another language.

I hope that the multilingual Internet will continue to grow. And these
statistics might be meaningless in the future - we might all be chatting
in English on a Chinese social networking site! (Remember, they have
more Internet users than the US today, but only 1/4 of Chinese are
online... Lot's of space to grow!)

Stian