Since we're not seeing an increase in UTF-16 or UCS-2 or anything else like that, this would seem evidence that the Web, or at least Google's view of it, is bec

Since we're not seeing an increase in UTF-16 or UCS-2 or anything else like that, this would seem evidence that the Web, or at least Google's view of it, is becoming even more increasingly dominated by Western European languages, which is itself an interesting idea. This assumes that new pages (in languages with non-Latin scripts) are likely to use national encodings, which (in my experience) is not true. Given any popular* website written in Arabic, Cyrillic, Hangul, Kanji, etc, chances are that it will be in UTF-8. The only times I see encodings like SJIS, KOI8, or ISO-8859-1 any more are in old old pages, written before mass popularity of internet, or on amateur/very small websites. The former were created before UTF-8, the latter by unskilled or inexperienced authors.