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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.)

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.