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Comment by terpua | Hacker News Reader

I'm assuming you are only talking about Google's US homepage? (i.e. not including youtube and other non google.com Google properties)?

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Yes, but the 'US' homepage as you call it is used by people all over the world.

See: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com

Then click on the 'more' link under the flags. Google keeps trying to redirect me to google.nl but I always set it back to google.com and it looks like I'm not alone in that.

In france everybody uses google.fr. Not all countries and cultures are comfortable with english.

Google.com is the #5 site in France.

Yeah sure, but what you fail to mention is that google.fr is #1 in france, with 5 times more visits, which means that there is a big subset of fr users that doesn't use google.com. Which was the original point.

The French seem to be especially uncomfortable with anything that isn't French....

Yeah, I do the same but it looks like the majority uses their country specific Google pages.

Yes true. But I am not sure you can discount the other domains

For example .co.uk and .com.hk, for example, have a global reach of 3 and 4 percent respectively (I've made a guess that those are the top two alternate domains).

So already that is a significant boost to the Google stats.

(edit: checked .fr, that is another 3% reach)

(edit2: .de and .in are also in the top 20 and contribute 3.5 and 4 percent in their turn. I make that a [rough] grand total of 57.5% reach.)

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