The most used search engines in Italy
12/21/2011
No surprise that Google has a primary role in Italy too, but here you will find a small report of the search engines evolution from 2004 to nowadays.
The Italian fastly growing on line market is still underdeveloped by an about 1-2 years lag (depending on the sector you consider) if compared to the anglophone web market, and consequently still far less competitive in non web-intensive sectors (but PPC bids are rapidly growing).
| Search Engine | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 |
| 45% | 59% | 67,8% | 71,2% | 86% | 91% | 92% | 92% | |
| Virgilio (powered by Google) | 53,5% | 23,3% | 16,2% | 18,1% | 5% | 4% | 3% | 3% |
| Bing (former MSN Search) | 52% | 25,1% | 21,5% | 17,9% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 3% |
| Yahoo!Search (powered by Bing) | 42,2% | 11,1% | 12,5% | 11,4% | 4% | 3% | 3% | 1% |
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 1% | |
| Libero ricerca | 23,9% | 16,8% | 17% | 13,2% | 3% | - | - | - |
| Altavista | n.d. | 6% | 5,4% | 3,2% | - | - | - | - |
| Tiscali Search | 27,5 | 3,5% | 2,8% | 1,6% | - | - | - | - |
| Data source: http://www.audiweb.it/ (2004-2005), Nielsen//Netratings (2006-2007) and SEMS (since 2008). Till 2007 data refer to ”reach” coverage in considered panel, since 2008 numbers refer to expressed preference in panel (2.000 people). |
These numbers do not take into any consideration You Tube, wich in Italy is the 3° most visited Internet property (after Google and Facebook). The other most used Social Networks in our Country are Twitter (now growing really fast, having more than 2 millions of users) and Linkedin (by far the most spread one for professional contacts, having more than 1,5 millions of users).
Bing’s poor performace, if compared to englophone market, is mainly due to the lag in data integration with Facebook (which in Italy is not active jet). Facebook counts infact more than 23 million of users (95% of internet users, almost 1/2 of total population of the Country) and is still working on its own searching potential, based on open graph protocol (the preference of 1% recorded this year is a clear evidence of this process).
A structured web & email offer targeted to Italian final consumers is destined to fail if not written in Italian (due to the poor diffusion of English among low literacy level population and to the very high spam perception of non-Italian written messages). Moreover in Italy there is a very strict privacy code, which prohibit opt-out actions and punishes all responsibles for these massive practices with severe sanctions (even with arrest and other penal consequences if the number of contacts involved is big enough).
