Seznam.cz Disputes Google’s No. 1 Ranking In Czech Republic

Czech search engine Seznam.cz disagrees with recent reports that Google has overtaken it as the number one search engine in the Czech Republic.

In a blog post with an accompanying English-language translation, Seznam calls last week’s news reports “misleading” and says they were based on “a rather unobjective interpretation of Toplist statistics.”

The news, which we reported here was also published and discussed in numerous Czech media outlets. According to numbers published last week by Toplist, a web measurement service, Google had surpassed Seznam by a couple percentage points in the first full week of 2011.

But in its coverage of the story, Lupa.cz referred to “bad data” as the reason that Google showed up as the country’s most popular search engine. Seznam’s blog post takes a similar position:

Unfortunately, there is no official metric which would allow us to find out the clear and demonstrable share on the search engine market. Considering that no data is available from all market players, inaccurate Toplist statistics served for drawing conclusions. Moreover, in the version applied in interpreting market share, access to Czech internet pages and foreign ones was taken into account. Seznam.cz only concentrates on the local, Czech market and its domain has no other language versions. In this statistic, Seznam.cz is the leader of the market, even according to Toplist.

Seznam goes on to say that, based on November 2010 statistics from NetMonitor.cz, Seznam.cz had 3.98 million users in the Czech Republic — 68% of the country’s internet population.

Seznam also poked at Google for not participating in NetMonitor’s measurement service. “Google does not provide any data on its visitor rate and refuses to participate in official measuring. Therefore, the claim on the loss of the position of the most visited Czech server is not based on demonstrable facts.”