The objective of the observatory is to investigate the situation of the Basque Country on the Internet, as well as the situation and evolution of the domain .EUS. This year, in addition to the indicators analyzed year after year, the existence of indications that the Google search service will discriminate against the Basque country has been analyzed. And yes.

One of the starting points of concern has been the research carried out by the new Catalan organization Aliança. The coordinator, Albert Cuesta, explained in a press conference that the influence of Google's algorithm on Catalan spectacularity has been analyzed when it comes to conducting the searches, and that from the spring of 2022, the results in Spanish are being prioritized and punished by those who were in Catalan. This means that in 66.5% of the websites analyzed, compared to equivalent content in Spanish, the option of Catalan has lost visibility.

In Euskal Herria, those responsible for Wikipedia in Euskera have also detected the modification of Google's algorithm. Despite the upward trend in the overall number of visits, there is a decline in several areas. In the words of Luistxo Fernández, president of EWKE, “at the Wikilarien Cultural Association Euskal Kultur Elkartea we are concerned because we have evidence that is feeding us well the Wikipedia in Euskera in terms of content and quality, and yet since last year we have been losing traffic in certain areas. The key is searches from Google, we have it very clear.”

Also in the sample analyzed by PuntuEus, it has been identified that in the search service of Google Euskera is discriminated in favor of Spanish, so the visibility of Euskera in the Internet has been lost. “Google responds to the searches of Basque users with results in Spanish. This has serious consequences because it discards Euskera and leads users to browse Spanish, reducing the visibility of Euskera. We will now go deeper into the analysis to measure the impact of the outcome on the Basque Internet and analyze the corrective measures to be taken,” explains Josu Waliño, director of the PuntuEus Foundation.

Positive data

But not everything is bad. The consequences of the changes imposed by Google are there, but the data provided by the PuntuEus Foundation are also positive.

On the one hand, there are already almost 15,000 domains with the .eus extension, with a strong growth rate and a renewal rate (about 90% of the domains are renewed when the expiration date arrives).It is the most used domain in the Basque Country after the .com and .es domains.

Euskera appears in 76% of the puneus websites, and it is noteworthy that the foundation performs a study of all the websites of Euskal Herria (with a person who reaches 90%) and in them (i.e., throughout the market) it is seen that the presence of Euskera is 14%. Punteus is therefore an important milestone for the digital presence of the Basque Country, with 76%.

Typologically, 72% are used to mark main or complete websites, with 14% being the deviations. And another interesting typology is who has bought those 14,000 points eus, most of which are companies. It may have been widely suspected that .eus is an area of institutions or administrations, and not, only 9% of all domains, as the graph shows.