Edu365.cat

According to a report recently published by Softcatalà, an organisation working to encourage the use of Catalan in new technologies, the presence of the Catalan language on the internet has doubled over the last two years. The report, which bears the title 'La salut del català a internet el 2005' (The Health of the Catalan Language on the Internet in 2005), takes as its initial reference point another report published in 2003, also by Softcatalà.

In effect, 'The Health of the Catalan Language on the Internet in 2005' concludes that in less than two years, the number of websites in Catalan has gone up from 2,926,550 to 7,140,000, which places the Catalan language at number twenty-six in the worldwide web ranking. One of the most important contributing factors in this increase is the popularisation of blogs in Catalan (blogs are a kind of personal diary open to participation from readers).

It must also be acknowledged that the increased presence of Catalan on the web can partly be explained by the fact that today's search engines can index many more pages than they did two years ago; which leads us to discuss the method employed by Softcatalà.

For this research project, Softcatalà used the Google database, the most powerful search engine on the internet. It has, then, overlooked other search engines and alternative pages such as e-mail, chats and instant messaging, which are more difficult to gauge.