I believe that http://es.ask.com/ by defaulting to all documents on the web to Spanish actually could be almost re-branded as a search engine for all the Spanish speaking Hispanic users, rather than a search engine for Spain. If it was just for Spain, then they should have defaulted the radio button to reflect that. I think they got their marketing a bit backwards. Here is a sample default search for “comida mexicana” by just typing in and go:

http://es.ask.com/web?q=comida+mexicana&qsrc=0&o=0&dm=lang

See what I mean?

I had a very good conversation over lunch with Paul Gardi sometime back about the Hispanic market and I very well remember starting out the conversation “so, will Ask/Teoma will be focusing on the Hispanic market?” and his response was “Yep, there are 600 billion reasons for it.” He was referring to the $600 billion in purchasing power potential. It seems that there are a lot of politics among Ask and it’s just a matter of getting to it among other priorities, but YES they are and will be growing in that focus to gain market share over their competitors.

Yahoo! does have their own Spanish (espanol.yahoo.com) and Spain (es.yahoo.com) versions or we also call them “properties”. Google however has two versions of Spanish (www.google.com/intl/es/ and www.google.com.es/) and one version of Spain (www.google.es).

Saludos,

Nacho

Thanks for sharing Nacho! It's always about the money. :) I was hoping there were 600 billion other reasons.