Regular Internet users in A. C. of the Basque Country, first of all, opt for the websites offered by the media, followed by those relating to leisure, institutions, electronic banking and travel, according to the data for the second quarter of 2008.

The website with the most hits continues to be “elcorreodigital.com”, as 12.2% of the total Internet users visit that space, which comes to a total of 102,400 hits. The next newspapers in terms of hits are "diariovasco.com”, with a percentage of 6.2% and marca.es with 3.9%.

After the media websites, the most popular sites are leisure-related messengers, such as “hotmail.com”, mentioned by 4.4% of Internet users.

Basque Public Administration and electronic banking continue to be among the top of the most visited websites in the second quarter of 2008

The Basque Government website D “euskadi.eus”) is in a key position, as it accounted for 3.3% of the total hits and was visited a total of 27,800 times, together with “gipuzkoa.net”, which accumulated 3.2% of the total hits.

The sites run by banks for their customers are among the most popular sites: “kutxa.net”, with a percentage of 3.5% of hits, “bbk.es” received 2.5% of the hits and “cajalaboral.es” 1.8%. However, the Bizkaia bank’s percentage had dropped down slightly compared to the previous quarter.

Special mention should be made of the improvement in "youtube.com”’s ranking, as it moved up from eighth to fourth place, and msn.es bursting into the top 10 with 22,800 hits, as it shot up from 32nd place to tenth in the ranking.

Other pages that shot up the ranking were “deviajes.com”, which rose from 44th to 16th, and “viajes.com”, that went from 33rd to 17th, along with “turismo.com”, that leapt up 27 places from 53rd to 26th.

97.5% of Internet users in the Basque Country use “Google” as the search engine

With regard to search engines, Internet users in the A.C. of the Basque Country prefer Google, which has ousted the other search engines. 97.5% of this collective, which stands at over 900,000 Internet user aged 15 and over, use Google, compared to 2% that resort to Yahoo and 0.2% to Terra. The number of people using Google has increased by 40,000 people in the second quarter of 2008.

Ranking of the 20 most visited websites by Internet users. 4th quarter of 2007 and 2nd quarter of 2008 (in thousands)

Source: EUSTAT