Around 2.6 million Swiss, some 37.4 per cent of the population, have access to the Internet at home, according to a survey published in Zurich on Wednesday.

The survey, produced by MMXI Suisse, revealed that Swiss surf the World Wide Web for 12.5 minutes on average per day from home.

The most popular Swiss Internet sites include the search engine search.ch and the Swiss Federal Railways web site. The American search engines Yahoo and Altavista are also included in the top ten sites accessed by Swiss web users.

Results from the survey also include details of the kind of people who regularly surf the web. The average Swiss Internet surfer is young, male and well-educated.

In the last month in Switzerland, 55.4 per cent of those connecting to the web from home were male. Women represented 35.8 per cent, while children aged from two to fourteen made up the remaining 8.8 per cent.

The study of Internet surfing habits has been carried out simultaneously in a number of countries across Europe. The web is most popular in Germany, where people spend on average more than 13 hours per month online. Spain is next (9.4 hours), followed by Norway (9.1 hours), Italy (8.1 hours), Denmark (7.2 hours), Great Britain (6.8 hours) and Switzerland and France (5.7 hours).

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