Not that I want to start a debate on demographics, but “7.3% French Canadians who don’t speak English”?? No; there is a much larger part of the French Canadian population who is French unilingual. You are assuming that all bilingual speakers are amongst the declared (i.e. Stats Can) French speaking population.

Also, I believe there is a lot of content in French on the Web (as well as Japanese, Spanish, German, and more and more Chinese). What I wanted to illustrate was I suspected that content online is somehow on scale with the content volume one finds in a language (books, magazines, etc.), and also with the level of Internet usage in the countries where that language is spoken. But, true, there is more content in English, obviously.

I suspect that an English Searcher Satisfaction survey would show about the same level of satisfaction. Of course, if there was a big difference(say 10% +) either way, it would be quite interesting to explain it.

I did some research at wikipedia and it noted that 25% of Canadians speak French. 17.7% of Canadians are bilingual which leaves 7.3% French Canadians who don’t speak English. This is a large portion of a population of over 33 million people who are searching only in French.

My concern isn’t whether Search Engines are doing a good job at efficiently spidering through French content. I’m more concerned about the limited amount of French content that is available for these spiders to search through. The search engines are only as good as the content that is published.

Does anyone know what the numbers are for English Searcher Satisfaction so that we can compare?

I think search result quality/satisfaction is linked to the available content, and that content depends on how “productive” a culture/country/group of so-and-so language locutors are. One is not dramatically limited by the fact one does not read English. But true, English is the major source, due to the fact that so many non-native speakers can be content contributors.

It is interesting to see the number of articles by language on Wikipedia. As a reader of Japanese, I know there are tons of online content in that language (1 billion books printed a year, true half of them manga, but that is a small country with an incredible content churn out. Literally everything is translated in that language), and I am quite sure a Japanese speaking searcher finds a lot on Google Japan. But what attracts my attention is the number of articles in languages such as Swedish and Polish: they seem to rank much higher in Wikipedia than their “natural” rank in terms of numbers of speakers. What explains it? The level of information technology penetration (Poland?), levels of education? number of get-a-life geeks willing to spend all their waking hours writing entries?

Your post is also interesting because it seems to link satisfaction to cultural characteristics. True, Quebecers seem to be people who dislike face-to-face confrontation and arguments (a culture of consensus, very much like the Japanese; interstingly, both were isolated for a long time in their history), but I would suggest that they would not hesitate to express their dissatisfaction in a survey. Also, we would need to compare that with speakers of other languages.

Finally, what if they are satisfied because… the results were good and relevent? In a world where 70-80% of searches are performed in Google (which is pretty good with French and Japanese content, languages I know), one is forced to believe that that search engine is pretty darn efficient, since nothing has come up in the market for years to take its place.

S.Hamel
http://blog.immeria.net