Multilingual search

Multilingual Search moves and seeks new contributors

2005-08-15T20:46:00.000+01:00

Multilingual Search has moved house - to www.multilingual-search.com.

Explains managing editor, Andy Atkins-Krüger, "We've received a great deal of encouragement from readers who say we're providing a useful service. Now we've made Multilingual Search easier to use for marketers who are researching particular projects. It's now possible to view only posts from the country in which you're interested."

And we're looking for new contributors to extend our reach right around the globe!

Do give us your feedback and comments - they're much appreciated.

Yahoo! Invests $1 Billion in China's Alibaba

2005-08-15T17:57:00.000+01:00

Seems the battleground between the major search engines has shifted to China. Following Google's interest in Baidu - that recently went public and whose stock is performing well - Yahoo has announced a billion dollar investment in Alibaba - a Chinese ecommerce site.

The billion dollar's gets Yahoo! a 40% stake in the company.

A recent MarketWatch article gives a good overview of the recent increase in activity of search engine and tech stock in the Asian continent.

MSN Spain unveils a simplified makeover

2005-08-04T16:20:00.000+01:00

Clearly the big news this week is PPC, all across the board (Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and MSN). The new products that will inevitably keep everyone busy adjusting and transforming their campaigns. But life goes on, and other news, although small and overshadowed, ought to be brought into the light, if only just for a moment.

Yesterday, MSN Spain dropped their old portal look, opting for a brand new, simplified appearance. The changes come from direct user feedback and navigation preferences, following a similar transformation in the U.K. and the U.S. earlier. It looks a bit like a global domino effect for MSN’s International portals. For example, France, Germany already have the new and improved versions, while other European countries, such as, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Switzerland and Netherlands and a number of others are still untouched.

The launch of the new appearance falls under the international Clarity in Ads project which is dedicated to promoting non-intrusive and more innovative advertising techniques to satisfy the user. With this lighter look, not only does the page load faster, but MSN Spain (like in its other global portals) makes it much easier to access their communication services/products such as Hotmail, MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces. In the new portal, users can also personalize their experience using My MSN, where they can select how and what content to see on the portal. According to Nielsen NetRatings MSN Espana already enjoys 9.5 million monthly users.

AOL targeting Latino Market

2005-08-03T17:37:00.000+01:00

Seems AOL is joining the popular push to attract more Latin traffic. They have announced a new TV and radio campaign whose goal is to draw more Latinos to AOL.

The Spanish speaking market seems to very popular right now.

The “Golden” Pages—Yellow Pages, Czech Republic and Growth

2005-07-31T16:28:00.000+01:00

Yellow Pages—so familiar, so practical and SO trendy. Have you noticed? Yellow Pages have been in the spotlight now that local search is picking up speed. So much in fact that all the buzz has resulted in a very complete third edition of the Kelsey Group study on Yellow Pages, “Global Yellow Pages(TM) 2005: The Kelsey Group's Outlook & Forecast" (paid report) all over the globe. And why not, with pay per call starting to pick up speed and looking like the next big time attraction, Yellow Pages are bound to jump in for the ride, tapping into that “familiar” and “practical.” Although according to John Kelsey, the industry, as a whole, has a lot of obstacles and hurdles.

“‘The Yellow Pages claims they were the originator of local search. The steps that Google, Yahoo! and other online players are taking into local search might have in some way inspired traditional Yellow Pages publishers to become more innovate and adaptive. Also, at the end of the day, everybody will win because directional media, which includes online, local search, print and other flavors such as wireless, is important when the advertiser is closer to the transaction,’ says Neal Polacheck, senior VP, The Kelsey Group.”

For anyone who’s glimpsed into the Kelsey Group’s study, Yellow Pages are everywhere. Today, MSE will shed some light on someone you’re probably not expecting. The Czech Republic’s Yellow Pages publisher, Mediatel, has decided to launch a major online marketing campaign to promote their digital Yellow Pages. After all, their print edition has a significant audience, as 70% of the Czech population relies on the trusty pages.

Much like the yellow pages publishers in other countries, “‘We recognize the growing significance of the Internet [for the Czech business community] and we want to focus on it more," Řezníčková said. "We want to be more than a mere publisher of the biggest phone directory and companies' catalog in this country’” says Zuzana Řezníčková, Mediatel’s General Manager. In fact, the move to promote the online version of the popular resource is more than timely, now that the www.zlatestranky.cz are already growing in popularity, with 25% growth in hits since the beginning of this year.

In fact, the popularity of online business directories and search for local information is picking up very fast in the Czech Republic, and the major portals are enjoying the boost, as more and more funds are shifted their way. Atlas.cz, the third biggest portal, hopes their revenues will grow by 60% thanks to investments in online business listings.

According to Oldřich Bajer, of Seznam.cz (the most popular Czech portal), there is an increasing interest in priority listings. Sound familiar? Clearly, the Czech Republic will be moving in the direction that other countries are already quite familiar with. “This year, local Web portals expect to receive some 750 million Kč ($29.6 million) from online advertisers. Half should come from revenues generated through priority listings in business databases.” Not too shabby.

So what’s next? And where do the local Yellow Pages come into the picture. Without a doubt, considering their popularity, they won’t be left behind. Much like in other countries, Mediatel, “has considered possible cooperation with other Web portals to expand its Internet activities.”

So keep your eye on the Yellow Pages—their “golden” in the Czech Republic (golden=zlatý).

Sources:

iMedia Connection
Yahoo Finance
Prague Post
Kelsey Group Blog

Slovak broadband connections mushroom

2005-07-29T22:46:00.000+01:00

How does a 527-percent growth sound? Surreal. But true. Last year Slovakia had 8,275 broadband internet connections and now, they’re looking at 51,869. With that number, coming to a 1% penetration of the entire population, they are clearly far behind their European neighbors, but definitely plenty to get excited about. The EU25 average is 8.6% and the EU15 is 10%.

Source:

DMEurope

Alibaba, “Connecting China and the World”

2005-07-29T22:28:00.000+01:00

Former President Clinton will be back for an internet related visit to China. But that’s probably not the biggest news. What’s more interesting is the event he will be speaking at. On September 10th, Alibaba, China’s largest and by far the most successful Chinese e-commerce company is hosting China’s Internet Summit with a global signature. "Connecting China and the World," will bring together a number of renowned players from the global playground for a dialogue intended as a sort of brainstorming session to address imminent issues in the Chinese internet market (ie. future of online gaming, ecommerce, and globalization issues). According to Alibaba the summit is non-partisan and it certainly seems that way, considering Alibaba has invited Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay, also known as Alibaba’s primary competitor.

Source:

Auctionbytes

Internet Behavior from virtually every angle—Findings from Chile

2005-07-29T12:58:00.000+01:00

Interesting news to take note of out of Chile: Looks like the penetration of internet usage in the country is somewhat stuck at 36%, only one point up from data collected in 2003. But it’s nothing to get sunken up about; Chile is in fact leading the Latin American pack and runs in step with Italy and Spain. But there’s more. According to WIP, World Internet Project, even the most advanced countries are reaching saturation limits at 77%.

But perhaps the most interesting findings lie in the WHY people connect in the first place, varying from country to country, or region to region. Such a strong behavioral differentiation is a crucial statistic to underline and make use of. “Internet usage in Chile and the world: First results of the World Internet Project-Chile”, a 17 page study, segments internet usage into a number of categories, ie. income, location, sex, expertise, external environmental factors, awareness, skills, and much more, drawing more than a few thought provoking conclusions.

“Internet use is influencing more and more aspects of people’s lives. Yet we do not know very well to what extent. First, because common speech often confuses vague or even contradictory terms such as ‘information society’…‘globalization’ and ‘new digital media’. The second cause is that Internet use is not a phenomenon that expands automatically and homogenously like a chemical reaction.”

No doubt about it, there’s nothing homogenous about it; which is why online marketers are looking at the global market through a segmented lens. For example, the study shows the difference between patterns of internet use in a developed country such as the U.S. and Chile, who is clearly behind in terms of digital development. The U.S. user will spend more time using the internet for practical reasons (online banking, travel reservations, purchases, etc.) whereas their Chilean counterparts are more inclined to rely on the internet for less pragmatic and more socially driven reasons.

Much like the comparison between Chile and the U.S., the study also concludes that internet use in Mediterranean counties is driven more by social factors than anything else, where as the online community in Nordic countries relies on the internet more for functional, pragmatic purposes. The following is a break down of users who buy online. Interestingly enough, Chile, although behind the always prominent, leads Italy and far bypasses Spain.

On that same e-commerce note, but from a different source, TradeDoubler concluded that the European online community shops all day long, but when the sun goes down, business goes on. Of course, even that varies from country to country. The Danish shop from 5-6pm; the British shopping peak hours are around 8pm, Swedes follow around 9pm, and Germans and Italians prefer to fill their online carts between 2-4pm. Spanish online shoppers pull out their wallets more between 12 and 1pm, while the French take it easy and spread their shopping activities from 6-10pm.

Although TradeDoubler assures us that most European’s shop in the evenings, there’s plenty of shopping going on during work hours. Take note. And if you’re up for more interesting details, download the latest World Internet Project study, it’s worth a good look over.

Sources:

WIP
E-Directivos

Technoroti broadens their horizons

2005-07-29T12:29:00.000+01:00

According to the Technorati blog, you’re all welcome to search for blogs in a total of ten languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish). This new search addition is still in beta (ie. there are still some mixed language results coming up) and works only in keyword searches. But it looks like Technorati is in the right place at the right time, as blogging continues to grow globally.

Interview with Chrysi Philalithes, European Marketing Director, MIVA (Espotting) and Christer Pettersson, Online Manager – Search, Eniro.

2005-07-28T13:24:00.000+01:00

Congratulations on the deal between MIVA and Eniro.

Thank you both for taking time out to talk to Multilingual Search and answer a few questions about the deal with MIVA and Eniro.

RASMUS: A lot has happened with Espotting in Scandinavia since launching your service a couple of years ago. Could you maybe tell us a bit on the history behind Espotting and entering the Scandinavian market?

CHRYSI: Sure. Espotting were the first Pay-Per-Click player to enter the Scandinavian market. We launched in Sweden at the end of 2002 and in Norway and Denmark in 2003. Our expertise in the market is second to none - we have been offering Pay-Per-Click solutions to both advertisers and partners for longer than any other player. Our customer base has continued to grow since we launched.

RASMUS: The deal between Eniro and MIVA covers MIVA's Private Label Partner programme which launched recently. Could you tell us a bit about that? How does it work? What does it take to be a Private Label Partner? What are the key benefits for the partner?

CHRYSI: As we all know, Pay-Per-Click has been the shining star of online advertising. Our Private Label Partner programme provides large companies the chance to offer a Pay-Per-Click Advertising solution under their own brand name. For example, through this announcement, Eniro will be offering Eniro Pay-Per-Click Ads to advertisers and partners. The benefits for our Private Label partners are:

• A speed-to-market solution - they can begin offering their own Pay-Per-Click Ads to clients in less time than they would if they were to develop a Pay-Per-Click solution on their own. What this translates to is the ability to earn revenue quickly and effectively.

• MIVA is the largest independent Performance Marketing Network in the world. What do we mean by that? That we do not have a destination site and so we do not compete with our partners for users to their website.

• We pioneered Private Label and have a wealth of experience in understanding partners' needs. Other private label partners include Lycos and Verzion in the U.S and Mitsui in Japan.

RASMUS: Contextual advertising is a hot subject in the online advertising sector these days and more and more companies are launching contextual programmes where ads will be matched to the actual content on the pages where the ads are shown. How will MIVA's listings be served by Enrio? Will it only be in relation to actual search queries or will we see listings on some of Eniro's content properties (Guides) too?

CHRYSI: Espotting (now MIVA) were the first company to develop a Content Product back in 2001 and many of our partner websites in Scandinavia, which will soon come under the Eniro brand, have content as well as search implementations. It's quite interesting to note that we use the word Content and not contextual. Why? Simply put, we believe that the contextual products currently available on the market are not as targeted as our content product which uses a human editorial process to select the keywords that trigger the Pay-Per-Click Ads, as well as automated tools.

RASMUS: How will the advertisers sign up? Through Eniro's properties or through MIVA?

CHRYSI: For the Scandinavian market, in the short-term advertisers will sign up through Espotting and soon through Eniro. For the rest of Europe and the US, advertisers can sign up through MIVA.

CHRISTER: We have been using DART for our advertisers up until today, but we expect to launch direct sign up with Espotting from Eniro this summer.

RASMUS: The press release mentions MIVA's assets in Scandinavia and that the deal falls under the Espotting brand. Does this mean that the Espotting Brand still exists? And what in particular is MIVA's assets in Scandinavia these days?

CHRYSI: When we rebranded our company in June to MIVA, we did not rebrand our Scandi operations – they continued to use the Espotting brand. Now, with the partnership with Eniro, the goal is to use the Eniro brand in Scandi, which is much stronger than the Espotting brand. So the Espotting brand will, in the near future, cease to exist as the front-facing client interfaced brand. To provide more detail on exactly what ‘assets’ were transferred to Eniro, we mean that our contracts with our clients (advertisers and partners) and our team members (our employees!) based in Scandinavia, have been purchased by Eniro. In summary, MIVA, Espotting Scandi's parent company, will, we believe, have a stronger presence in the Scandinavian market through our Private Label deal with Eniro than we would have had by remaining a stand-alone company under either the MIVA or Espotting brand. We think the partnership between us and Eniro (the combination of the Espotting Scandi assets, Eniro’s brand and resources, and MIVA’s ongoing expertise at Pay-Per-Click and providing Private Label solutions) will create a leading (if not the leading) Pay-Per-Click offering in Scandi.

RASMUS: The fact that Eniro bought the Scandinavian assets does that mean that we won't see other Private Label deals in Scandinavia?

CHRYSI: No, it doesn't mean that you won't see other Private Label deals from MIVA.

RASMUS: How much will the deal with Eniro mean in terms of building the reach for Espotting/Eniro advertisers and partners?

CHRYSI: Eniro is, as all your readers know, the leading directory in the Nordics. Advertisers will benefit as their Pay-Per-Click Ads will be displayed across Eniro's web properties. The traffic volumes from across its web properties have continuously increased. In April 2005, the number of unique users to www.eniro.se alone increased by 51% to an all-time high of 4.3m (versus April 2004).

RASMUS: Google's publishers program - Adsense - has seen a huge increase in popularity among many webmasters since it launched and Eniro has been running the Adsense/Adwords programme up untill now. Do you have an oppinion on why MIVA's product was more compelling to Eniro?

CHRISTER: We have been trough mergers and accustions before as have bought other companies before. This aproach had made us a major online directory / yellow page company.

We wanted a program that offeres private label agreements and we looked at the market place and experienced that neither Overture nor Google Adsense offers this solution to their partners today. Furthermore we wanted a running company – a company that was already in business and had experienced employees. Espotting fitted this perfectly and it was the obvious solution to us.

The services now offered through Eniro will run on the same existing technology as MIVA is using today. This was also one of the major issues for us. We wanted to be able to get off the ground quickly and offer our advertisers new marketing solutions.

Finallly Espotting have been researching and analysing new ways of marketing companies online that didn’t have an online pressence (website). Espotting had been working on the Pay Per Call model which was something we also had been pondering about. This and their excisting business model made it a clear to us that Espotting was the right solution for us.

RASMUS: Interesting. Now the next obvious question is; what about Eniro’s excisting arrangement with Google? Today the search properties of Eniro are all using the Google search technology with Adsense on top. How will this turn out in the future?

CHRISTER: Well, so far we have been very pleased with Google – both on the advertising and search platforms. Right now we don’t have any plans of changing the search part away from Google, but of course we will be unsing Espotting as the “sponsored listings” provider. On our content properties and guides we will proberbly be using Google Adsense, but we’re pragmatic and things change all the time, so what the situation will look like in the future, I can’t promise you.

RASMUS: Excellent! Thank you very much both Chrysi and Christer. It has been very interesting talking to you both and I hope the deal between Eniro and MIVA will benefit at lot of webmasters, user and advertisers in Scandianvia.

Press release from MIVA/Espotting on the deal.
MIVA
Eniro

Interview with Miguel Acosta, Ask Jeeve's Director of European Business Development: Opening alternative doors in Spain and Europe

2005-07-26T18:03:00.000+01:00

There has been plenty of talk about Ask Jeeves’ plans and progress in the U.S., but Ask Jeeves is also keeping plenty of heads turning in the European market. Spain is a recent endeavor with plenty of action to this day to keep the interested on the ball. Recently, MSE covered Ask Jeeves’ strategic agreements with reputable Spanish companies, as well as their upcoming marketing push for the Spanish market in September. Following the search engine’s evolution, as well as the recent IAC acquisition, the famous butler is certainly dressed to impress and shaped up for his imminent adventures. MSE thought it was about time to hear about the past, present and future directly from the source. With a kindly granted interview with Miguel Acosta, Director of European Business Development for Ask Jeeves, MSE zooms in on the details, so to speak and brings you a bit more insight, tracing Ask Jeeves’s footsteps, chiefly through Spain and but also onto the broader, European landscape. Read on and craft your conclusions (there is plenty to think about):

MSE: In your opinion, which search engines will pose direct competition to Ask Jeeves in the beginning? And if you think that will change with time, which will be the competition further down the line?

Miguel Acosta: Globally, today there are four Search engines with their own technology: Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. Currently, these are our competitors. Although that new search engines might appear within certain niches, we believe that mid-term, the competition will continue to be the same players.

MSE: If you (Ask Jeeves España) plan on competing with Google who enjoys over 90% searches in Spain, what strategy does Ask Jeeves plan to adopt in order to be able to compete with the Spanish market leader? Will we be seeing something new and different?

MA: In AJ we have our own, different technology against the backdrop of our competition. Consequently, on many occasions our search results are going to vary from the other search engines (and equally relevant), which will increase the wide range of search possibilities for the users.

Additionally, we are starting of with three functionalities unlike the competition’s that we think are relevant to the user:

-myAskJeeves (to save search results),
-related searches (to help users sharpen their searches—found on the right, in the results page)
-binoculars (help zoom in on screenshots on the results page, without having to abandon the search results).

MSE: If on the contrary, Ask Jeeves does not plan on competing with Google, but rather on complementing Google and laying out an alternative for information search, as you stated in your interview with Libertad Digital, how does Ask Jeeves plan to achieve this?

MA: When we talk about competing with Google, what we are referring to is the idea of having the user search in more than one search engine. If we take a closer look at the English speaking market (U.S. and U.K.), we find that these users use between three and four different search engines every month. We think that the Spanish internet user will have the same tendency and here is where we see our competitive advantage.

MSE: Your agreement with TPI to add their Yellow Pages to the search engine gives reason to think that you will be putting an important emphasis on local search also in Spain. Are there more plans that point in that direction? Perhaps with time we’ll see something similar to Ask Jeeves Local Search?

MA: The challenge of all search engines is to try to be focused on the user demand. In this context, there are many innovations in Ask Jeeves in the United States and we should “import” to Spain those functionalities that we think are most relevant. In this context, it’s feasible that we will develop our local channel if we see interest on the users’ side.

MSE: What do you think about the agreement that TPI signed with MSN, days before they signed another one with Ask Jeeves? And in relation to Ask Jeeves, what do you think about TPI’s plans to launch a new search engine, Noxtrum? Where does the agreement to use their Yellow Pages fit in, if TPI will soon be another member of the competition?

MA: Our agreement with TPI is based on the idea of offering additional content to users (in this case, Yellow Pages searches). This should be our focus, regardless of TPI’s plans. In addition, if we keep in mind that we think the user’s [Spanish] behavior will migrate to using several different search engines per month, we could situate ourselves on a stage where Noxtrum will compliment our own search engine.

MSE: Will we see more strategic agreements between Ask Jeeves Spain and other companies, such as the ones you have now with Vocento, Softonic, TPI and El Corte Ingles?

MA: Starting now we will see distribution agreements through which other web sites will use our search engine.

MSE: In the U.S., Ask Jeeves offers a complete and impressive set of search tools (Smart Search), are there intentions for the same in Spain?

MA: Yes, but always keeping in mind the relevance of these to the Spanish user.

MSE: In relation to other search engines, why is Ask Jeeves so late entering into Europe?

MA: Ask Jeeves has been in the UK for 5 years. The decision to enter the continental Europe is based on the confidence we now have in our technology (we have spent months adapting it to the diverse markets).

MSE: What plans do you have for the rest of Europe? Any country that will surprise us?

MA: I don’t think there are surprises…we will go to the expected markets: Germany, France, Holland and Italia (in alphabetical order).

MSE: After buying Excite Italia from Tiscali, what are Ask Jeeves’ plans for Excite and how will those integrate into Ask Jeeves upcoming European expansion?

MA: Our focus, as a company, is search. All of our actions will be aimed in that direction.

MSE: There’s a lot of talk about Barry Dillers’ comments on not renewing the AdWords contract between Ask Jeeves and Google in 2007 and moving towards Ask Jeeves’ own PPC system. En other interviews you said that Ask Jeeves Spain will use Adwords. Will this decision now change?

MA: At the present time, we will use Google’s sponsored results.

MSE: What impact is the IAC acquisition having on Ask Jeeves?

MA: The IAC acquisition was confirmed on July 19th, for that reason it’s still too early to analyze the impact; although we are very excited about the new project.

MSE: And now, what everyone is dying to know, but is afraid to ask:
How is the butler’s diet? Looks like he’s lost some weight. Is he getting in shape for his upcoming adventures in Europe?

MA: The butler’s diet has been a success! Not only that, but now we have him parachuting and diving (television ad campaign in the U.K.)…Decidedly, the butler has rejuvenated.

There’s no doubt about it, it’s time to be on the lookout for Ask Jeeves’ European endeavors. But you certainly won’t need your binoculars (not in this case, anyway); Ask Jeeves, along with its butler are intent on making a colorful entrance you’re unlikely to miss.

Google Buys Brazilian Tech Company

2005-07-22T03:53:00.000+01:00

Google annouced it purchased Akwan Information Technologies, a Brazilian search company. Google plans on establishing a Research and Development division there and to use it as a base to spearhead their Latin American efforts.

IP tv

2005-07-20T20:55:00.000+01:00

Telecom Italia and Tiscali announced the launch of IP tv starting at a T.B.D. date some time between September and November of this year.

Telecom Italia is now broadcasting Video On Demand via Rosso Alice 4 Mbit ADSL which they are planning to use for the newly announced IP tv service. The service will initially be available in 21 cities reaching an estimated 4 million families.

Source: Corriere della Sera

Google China Hire Starts MSN Lawsuit

2005-07-19T21:33:00.000+01:00

Seems a new hire at Google, formerly of Microsoft, has created a stir and has been served with a lawsuit by MSN.

ZDNet reports that Kai-Fu Lee is being sued by Microsoft for "the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working" and was now disregarding.

Canada May Outlaw Google

2005-07-14T16:46:00.000+01:00

Interesting article about the impact of new laws in Canada. Search engines in Canada will have to be very aware of copyright laws, though the international nature of the web may make it hard to enforce.

The only possibility is that the engines create different submitting procedures for the .ca version of the business.

Yahoo and Antena3 in a convenient exchange

2005-07-12T20:57:00.000+01:00

Today there is more news of strategic agreements in the Spanish market. This time Yahoo is in the picture. Yahoo Iberia will now be offering their popular email service, messenger and Kelkoo product search on the portal of one of Spain´s leading television channels, Antena3. In turn, Antena3 will become an additional well of information for Yahoo News in Spain.

According to Giorgio Sbampato, the director of New Business at Antena3, the company has established themselves as the most valued resource for televised information, 303 news alerts to mobiles, mobile channels and UMTS in Spain.

The Director of Yahoo Iberia and Kelkoo Spain, Javier Rodríguez Zapatero, added that the agreements is yet another step to reach out to a greater Spanish internet audience to offer their services and to built a partnership with a communications leader of Antena3’ standing.

Looks like its time to keep an eye on Spain. Plenty is happening already and certainly at this rate, more is on the way.

Source:

Yahoo! Noticias

Chinese search engine - Baidu - to float its shares

2005-07-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

Baidu is reportedly about to float increasing the speculation about Google's position in China. Baidu is the leading Chinese search engine - and one which Google bought a 4% stake in during 2004.

It is known that Google CEO - Eric Schmidt - flew to China last week and there are rumours that Google will attempt to buy Baidu as Google's own site does not have the leading position the company's become accustomed to!

Google facing search engine China quandary - Yahoo! News

Yahoo makes first moves on Poland

2005-07-11T09:33:00.000+01:00

Yahoo is heading towards a Polish launch - at least that's the conclusion of the Warsaw Business Journal which reports that Yahoo has launched Polish-language email accounts with 1 GB capacity.

Currently, the Yahoo domain for Poland - pl.yahoo.com redirects to Yahoo's UK site.

Yahoo currently operates native-language portals in Europe as shown by the map on their world.yahoo.com portal - but despite having a Russian language portal - Yahoo has little eastern European presence. In fact, they include the Russian language site as part of their presence in the US - targeting Russian speakers in north America.

Source - Warsaw Business Journal Online

Ukraine: Slowly churning out progress, but not without an effort

2005-07-09T18:20:00.000+01:00

Eclipsed by other Eastern European countries who have already joined the EU, and with less than 10% of the population online in one way or another, you don’t hear about internet progress in Ukraine too often. But here is a little insight: there is progress indeed; baby steps or not, Ukraine is slowly churning out progress in the internet arena.

There are now nearly 152,765 local .ua domains registered; that’s an increase of 2.4% in the last month. What’s more, according to a Sputnikmedia.net study, based on the number of unique users who accessed the internet at least once during June, the Ukrainian internet audience grew by 116,111, reaching 6,449,517. Geographically speaking, Kiev, the nation’s capital, leads the way with 55.43% of all national internet usage.

For those interested in the top searches, they are slightly different than in other European countries. Tourism does not make it into the top 5 in Ukraine, but weather does. In fact, the list as is follows:

1. weather
2. jobs in Kiev
3. jobs
4. chat
5. sonic
6. horoscope

Now, onto the search engines. The leading Russian search engine, Yandex, was the gateway of 32.1% of all traffic onto Ukrainian websites. And out of the Ukrainian search engines, sure enough, Google led pack with 42.9%

But with all this notable progress, there is plenty of unpaved road ahead. Companies, like UaMaster, one of the leading internet marketing companies in Ukraine, are not happy with the progress, but they’re also not sitting put and counting on improvement to fall out of the sky. On May 30th, the company organized the first multinational internet marketing conference in Kiev, Ukraine; an event that was not only much called for, but as many hope, will set off a chain of similar events in the near future.

According to Maksym Khmara, an UaMaster executive, “Another thing that is not very good in terms of the internet in Ukraine, we are isolated and stuck. In neighboring Russia, who although located next door, has by far surpassed our [Ukraine’s] levels, there are a variety of websites that publish internet marketing information. A few times a month, Russia hosts online advertising and SEO seminars. The conferences held in Russia bring together participants from all of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and other former Soviet Union countries. In Ukraine, these are scarce.”

The idea is to strive towards similar progress and activity seen in neighboring countries, letting the internet evolution else where, seep into Ukraine. “That is why UaMaster is trying to increase interest in the internet not only as a fountain of information, but also as an attractive advertising medium, by organizing professional events, like the latest Internet Marketing conference or the upcoming seminar related to Yandex.”

For those following Yandex’s success in Russia, can follow the search engine to Kiev, Ukraine, where on July 14th and 15th the company’s directors will lead the UaMaster sponsored conference on Internet Marketing, entitled, “Search Advertising and Advertising opportunities in Yandex.” More than anything, this will be a 2-day long informative session to spice up the Ukrainian business world with the necessary enthusiasm and instill confidence in search marketing and online advertising in general, an advertising medium that is taking many new markets by storm, but is still fairly weak in Ukraine.

Participants will include representatives from internet agencies, offline marketing agencies, internet managers of large companies with an online presence in Ukraine, advertising firms, marketing strategists, web design studios and anyone else who is keen on learning more about internet marketing and marketing opportunities at Yandex, still barely explored in Ukraine.

Not only will participants receive a participant diploma, but they will also be able to take a Yandex internet advertising test to become certified internet marketing specialists, according to Yandex’ criteria.

The idea is to get the word out, so for anyone who is interested in attending the conference (in Russian), more information is available on a specially created Internet Marketing in Ukraine site, sponsored by UaMaster.

But for those of you who don’t speak Russian or just can’t make it to Ukraine, Multilingual Search (MSE) will make sure to put Ukraine’s efforts toward internet progress into the limelight, covering the highlights of the upcoming conference in future.

Sources:

AIN

China Joins Spam Fight

2005-07-07T17:16:00.000+01:00

An article at internetnews.com, annouced that China is joining the internation battle against SPAM.
China, the article notes, is the leading nation for zombie computers - infected computers that are used to send Spam. They have joined the 29 nation (and 17 private sector groups) task force to combat Spam.

Domain names now available with Greek characters!

2005-07-07T10:39:00.000+01:00

The registration process started on Monday July 4^th and the users’ response was overwhelming taking into account Greek standards.

Only at the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission and within a period of four hours, almost 5.000 applications for registration of domain names with Greek characters and the Latin “.gr” were submitted for authorization. This number will tend to increase significantly, since applications were also received by the rest of the officially accredited registrars (almost 260) that operate in Greece.

Based on the new regulation, a Greek domain name can be registered in upper or lower case letters based on the Greek alphabet using the equivalent punctuation while at the same time the domain will be registered on behalf of the same user at all possible combinations (with or without punctuation, in upper or lower case letters).

According to the Gr – Hostmaster, the registry of ".gr" domain names, a feature of the registration process of domains will be the concept of "Bundle". Bundled domains are going to be those that differentiate only in punctuation but are otherwise the same to a main form. Any domain that is a Homograph of the original registration, written with Greek characters that are similar with Latin characters, may also become part of the Bundle.

Domain names that could be registered in each bundle are not automatically registered for the registrant but are instead barred from the list of available domain names until this particular registrant decides to "Activate" one or more of them. Each activation has a cost, depending on the registrar the registrant decides to use.

Even though Greek officials believe that this initiative will further boost the use of internet in Greece, there are some concerns that the new format will confuse people.

It is worth noticing that the maximum registration cost for a domain name for a two years’ period is 44€ (plus 19% VAT), for the transfer of a domain the charge is also 44€ (plus 19% VAT), while the renewal fee for a period of two years is 29.30€ (plus 19% VAT). The companies that have been officially appointed as registrars, need to pay a fee of 11.8€ to the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission for every registration

Sources :
Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission
Gr - Hostmaster
List of the Greek characters available for registration
Greek homograph character table

Mozbot: New French Search Engine

2005-07-06T02:20:00.000+01:00

Gary Price over at Search Engine Watch pointed this new engine out today. The engine is still in beta, and is getting its listings through a partnership with Google.

The add-ons seem to be the interesting elements that could make them popular. They have a personal "blacklist", a link to the archive.org (The WayBack Machine), Whois information, dictionary definitions and other additional features.

According the article Mozbot is looking to expand to the UK and US.

The latest on domains in Spain and Europe: Improvements and Obstacles

2005-07-05T19:51:00.000+01:00

Since the launch of the new and improved (or in more practical terms, cheaper and more accessible) .es domains, Red.es is happy to report that the number of registrations for .es domains in June was twice as much as in the previous month, reaching 3,348 registrations on June 30th and adding up to a total of 94,744 domains with the local .es extension.

Red.es is committed to doubling the number within a year, to help bring Spain close to its European counterparts who are leading the way.

This increase is due to an important decision to make the local .es domain name registration much more accessible, by decreasing the bureaucratic obstacles as well as the exaggerated prices (now decreased by 71%). Currently, while in the first phase of the improved registration process, the simplified .es registration is available to official organizations and government agencies.

While the .eu domain registration is going to be put into action starting October, there is still the issue of what to do about special characters (ñ, ü, etc.) which are currently not recognized by most browsers. The EURid, the non-profit organization in charge of the .eu domain, will have plenty on their hands to make sure that the future .eu domain will indeed reflect the multilingual makeup of the European Union.

The .biz and .info domains are already being tested to support multilingual domains, but for now, just for the German speaking market. The EURid are in a rush to deal with the issue quite yet. The official launch is in October is limited and until the start of the unlimited registration in February 2006, special characters are not a priority. According to Javier Saenz, Director of Arsys, a private domain name registration company, “I don’t think in 2006.” Time will tell, but it is definitely an issue to be taken seriously; now that so many local and segmented domains are made available, they might be truly local.

Sources:

Noticiasdot
Clm innovación

Blogging, taking Spain…and the world

2005-07-04T12:19:00.000+01:00

In a recent study by Auna, eEspaña, mentioned in an earlier post, blogging received its share of attention in a special section entitled eSociedad (eSociety).

Spain already has 68,000 blogs, but of course only half of them are actually active. It’s not difficult to get excited about writing a blog and then let that enthusiasm trail off. But even then, something has to be said for the Spanish “blogosphere” that doubles every 5-6 months.

Considering the importance of the Spanish language in the greater scheme of things, Spain is still nowhere near where it should be, in relation to other countries that relentlessly lead the pack. Take English for instance, a language drumming up a count of 1,300,000 blogs and French at 87,000 (with very strong growth in the last year). With Portuguese at 81,000 and Farsi with a striking 61,000, Spanish falls into 7th place, behind German and Polish.

Uncensoring. So while the spectacular GLOBAL blogging quilt blooms with ideas, outburst and reflection, why not help others dive into the frenzy of expression that’s taking the world, and Adopt a Chinese Blog.

Sources:
Navegante

Ask Jeeves, TPI, MSN, etc. Agreements, Strategy, Excitement

2005-07-01T20:13:00.000+01:00

Alright, so yesterday’s news of TPI’s upcoming Noxtrum search engine adventure, took more than a few by surprise, after they signed an agreement with MSN just 10 days back to provide MSN Paginas Amarillas (MSN Yellow Pages).

But when that seemed to be the peak, today’s developments proved to put yet another, much more mind-boggling twist to the situation. Let’s just say, it’s not about being faithful to one these days and competition is not always an obstacle.

Ask Jeeves has now made an alliance with a number of companies in Spain to prep them for their official marketing launch in September. El Corte Ingles, the shopping monster will provide the product search. This is a very solid move on Ask Jeeves part, considering El Corte Ingles’ longtime reputation and trust with the Spanish public, as a company that can be trusted—even online. Not to mention the traffic El Corte Ingles website enjoys. The partnership with Vocento will provide latest news, and Softonic, part of Grupo Intercom and the most popular free and paid software download service, will provide an additional attraction to the Ask Jeeves Spanish search engine.

But where it gets especially interesting and unforeseen is that Ask Jeeves has also signed an agreement with TPI to do none other than to use their Yellow Pages for LOCAL businesses’ contact information. This sets all theories upside down and overboard. What’s next for the Noxtrum search engine that TPI plans to put in action by the end of this year? Perhaps seeing potential competitors shake hands in strategic agreements is a very good thing, but it’s definitely not easy to digest. As mentioned in an earlier post, TPI definitely has the ball in their court, since they own the Yellow Pages, golden local information, in more ways than one.

When it comes to Noxtrum, sources in the sector are not very optimistic: “I do not believe that they are going to be very successful. It will be very difficult for them to compete with the global leaders, because these have hundreds of engineers trying to invent new things in search'. But let’s not get to discouraged; a new player in a growing market can only add to the fire.

The above is food for thought, but there is more exciting news on Ask Jeeves’ plans in Spain. And speaking of competition, Ask Jeeves is well aware of its upcoming challenges, and understands it’s not Google they’re going to be up against, who receives 94% of all of Spain’s searches. Miguel Acosta, European New Business Development Director for Ask Jeeves, in charge of Spain, says that “although we arrive after Yahoo and MSN, they are fresh and are the only search engine that offers a differentiated search experience for the consumer.” With that said, it’s official; Ask Jeeves will be making a marketing push in September and expects to spend over a million on the marketing campaign. After launching Ask Jeeves España (beta) for the first time in Spain this last April and now during the intense testing period, receiving some very professional input from experts like the founders of E-Dreams and Buongiorno MyAlert, they want to be come the alternative to the rest.

Finally, before the big push, Ask Jeeves will also close additional deals with important portals to consolidate traffic. Like in other countries, the idea in Spain is to generate profits solely through advertising. For that, Ask Jeeves España will continue to rely on Google’s AdWords technology in Spain, as they are already doing in the U.S. and U.K.

All in all, when summer has passed, the search engine frenzy will flood Spain with a different kind of heat.

Sources:

Cinco Días

MSN Spaces: much more than a success in Spain

2005-07-01T00:00:00.000+01:00

Let’s get back to MSN for a minute. Now here are some remarkable news: the use of MSN Spaces in Spain literally sky rocketed since it was launched on April 7th. That’s a million active users. Not too shabby. But to put that in perspective, for anyone who is still not impressed, Spain is in THIRD place, with the number of registered users surpassed only by the U.S. (2.5 million) and the U.K. (1.5 million). There’s more. Spain has the most active and fastest growing MSN Spaces user base than any other country.

Ironically enough, despite the noticeable growth in the Spanish market, according to Funadión Auna’s report, eEspaña 2005, Spain’s “information society” is quite a bit behind other European Union countries. To this day, only 34% of the Spanish population is online, falling short of the average 38.9%, not to mention 61% average in northern European countries. In fact, newly joined EU members, Cyprus and Slovenia, are at 53% and 47% respectively.

MSN Spain’s Spaces performance in the short timeframe and the enthrallment of the Spanish growing user base is indeed striking in the light of sluggish internet usage progress in general.

Sources:

ABC
Marketing Directo
Terra Actualidad

The Spanish newcomer with a local advantage (update)

2005-06-30T00:24:00.000+01:00

If you thought search in Spain wasn’t exciting enough, think again! TPI (Telefónica Publicidad e Información), reaching 11.89 million in benefits last quarter, is about to throw some spice into the mix, where Google, MSN and Yahoo are running the show and other, determined newcomers (Seekport) are playing to win their share. If you have been following the blog, on the 26th MSE (Multilingual Search) told you that MSN and TPI teamed up to create MSN Páginas Amarillas (MSN Yellow Pages) in Spain.

There have been rumors of more and today they became news. While TPI, the leading provider of Yellow and White pages in Spain, a Grupo Telefónica filial, is offering their service on MSN there is news that before the end of the year TPI hopes to launch their own search engine, called Noxtrum. Noxtrum will use its own website, independent of any portal such as Telefónica (uses Terra and Google).

The company’s developers are building Noxtrum, which will concentrate on searches in Spanish and Portuguese, but worldwide it seems. To cover other languages, TPI plans on reaching syndicate technology agreements, (with whom?!) to be able to use other specialized robots.

Now that the news is out, there’s not much to think about; it’s strategically perfect! Noxtrum will have a stunning LOCAL advantage. The search engine will not only index, but will also be backed up by TPI’s own business directory database (2 million listings) that feeds the Yellow Pages, White Pages and more. In Spain there is still a huge percentage of businesses that do not have a website, which are therefore invisible to consumers who try to find them online. With Noxtrum’s integrated database, when someone searches for a specific service or business category and location (ie. Bookstore in Madrid), apart from the traditional results, the search engine will supply a listing of businesses with or without a website, as well as their location and contact information. Of course, TPI also offers maps and directions, so its easy to assume those will be a part of the search results. In fact, just last month TPI incorporated a map service that allows users to find businesses and professionals within a 500 or 1,000 meter radius of a chose location. Sounding familiar?

The ranking algorithm will have a number of the typical criteria—one of these being the website’s link popularity. Naturally, that will not be the sole factor. So far, the company assures that ranking will not be influenced by paid advertising, nor will companies that pay for other TPI services have an advantage. There will be a pay per inclusion program, however. Fortis Bank experts say that TPI could benefit from the project by offering greater exposure to companies in the Spanish market that do not have an internet presence, pay per inclusion and the traffic it generates.

Search technology is not new to TPI, since they already use it in their Yellow Pages, where Internet users can search for businesses and professionals by activity, product, brand, business name, province or specific location. In fact, TPI enjoys nearly half a million clients in its editorial version and a total of 2 million listings. If we step away from the three giants and more than a few aspiring search players, TPI is in a very nice position to step up to the plate, if local is the focus. Looks like the agreement with MSN earlier was a sign: TPI is not going to miss out on search.

Sources:

El País
Finanzas.com
Bolsamania.com

Information on Broadband Access in Italy

2005-06-29T18:45:00.000+01:00

"Osservatorio Banda Larga" provides updated information on broadband access in Italy. The web site requires registration and provides up to date studies and articles from qualified journals and newspapers.

New Spanish search engine about to appear?

2005-06-29T18:05:00.000+01:00

Could the Spanish 'Paginas Amarillas' (Spanish Yellow Pages) be about to launch a new Spanish search engine?

Lucía Bartolomé contacted 'Multilingual Search' regarding having spotted a site at www.noxtrum.com under development. Currently only indexing is taking place.

Lucia says "The owner of the search engine is TPI (Telefónica Publicidad e Información), which is the owner of the spanish Yellow pages (www.paginasamarillas.es). They intend to link the information on the SERP with the information in the Yellow Pages, and basic inclusion in the search engine would cost 32€. They don't specify whether it's a monthly fee or whatever. "

TPI haven't officially informed us of any developments - we'll investigate and update this story as it develops.

Hong Kong to Enact SPAM laws

2005-06-27T22:51:00.000+01:00

The Direct Marketing News ran an interesting story that the Telecommunications Authority was getting ready to enact SPAM laws.

MSN ties the knot with Telefónica Publicity and Information (TPI)

2005-06-26T22:52:00.000+01:00

In an interesting move last week, MSN Spain, the leading portal in Spain and TPI (Telefónica Publicidad e Informacion), the principal business directory in Spain, have signed an agreement to integrate TPI’s yellow pages listings into a brand new channel of information, MSN Páginas Amarillas (MSN Yellow Pages). The joint venture makes available the 2 million listings in the TPI database to MSN Spain’s impressive 9.5 million monthly users.

Users will be able to conduct segmented searches, varying from activity, product, brand, company name, province, and city.

7 million registered MSN Messenger users in Spain will also be able to access the listings service directly from their messenger, by clicking on the “Actualidad” (MSN Today) tab, which among other things, features news and weather alerts.

Not only is the service available on the Páginas Amarillas (Yellow Pages) website, but MSN now has direct access on the MSN Spain portal to White Pages and a Maps/Directions service, two very popular TPI products.

According to Victor Castro, Country Manager MSN Spain, “with this agreement, MSN reaffirms our commitment to continue offering a web of information and communication services that adapts to the needs of our users. We are convinced that with the launch of MSN Páginas Amarillas we are making yet another step to situate ourselves as the leading online platform in the market. “

Source:

Marketing Directo
TPI
DiarioTI

eBay takes a juicy bite out of Spanish e-commerce

2005-06-24T16:42:00.000+01:00

As published in an earlier post, “Spanish E-Commerce: Optimistically on the rise,” there are now 4 million Spaniards who rely on e-commerce. With 1,000,000 users in Spain, eBay announced that it has now reached 25% percent of the growing number. The number also indicates a 15.8% of the 9,000,000 Spanish online users. Pretty impressive.

Naturally, the newly released book, entitled, eBay: Como Hacerse Rico En Internet (eBay: How To Become Rich on the Internet) has already found a place in all major bookstores.

Sources:

EntreBits
Libertad Digital

Yahoo! Music Radio—Alive with the Spanish beat

2005-06-24T16:08:00.000+01:00

On June 20th, Yahoo launched Yahoo! Música Radio (Yahoo Music Radio) in Spain, a service already available and successful in other European countries, but a newcomer to Spain. With more than 4 million users, Yahoo! Music is the top online music destination in Europe. It’s no surprise that Yahoo will now count on the popular service to grab another piece of the market by unlocking the music arena in Spain. The new service allows users to create and personalize their own radio channel, by evaluating and selecting favorite artists, albums and songs.

According to Noelia Fernandez, Director of Products and Services in Yahoo! Iberia, "In Spain, Yahoo Music is already very popular and has almost half a million users who visit the website to see videos and other contents. But the introduction of Yahoo Music Radio in the United Kingdom has created a new model, and has already captured many new users who are loyal to the product, doubling our audience."

The newly inaugurated service makes available 17 different radio channels, specifically programmed for the Spanish audience. Some of the channels include New Releases, Spanish Pop/Rock, Flamenco, Best of the 80’s, etc. The service is a part of Yahoo! Música, a free of charge service, which offers nearly 4,000 music videos, interviews, live performances and of course, an online store.

Sources:

Expansion
Europa Press
Vnunet
DiarioTI

Italian ICTLex wins Freedom blog awards 2005

2005-06-23T20:14:00.000+01:00

The European section of Reporters sans frontières has chosen the Italian blog www.ictlex.net as one of the most active Blogs defending freedom of speech. Ictlex.net was identified as the best blog in Europe, and one of the top 60 blogs worldwide.

Source: Corriere della Sera

Seekport nominates Elena Bonini Head of Index

2005-06-23T15:16:00.000+01:00

Seekport Tecnologie, the new pan European Search Engine has nominated Elena Bovini Head of Index for Italian activities launched this past Tuesday.
Elena is responsible for the quality of results provided by seekport.it and is based in Milano. She will coordinate the editorial staff and oversee all search and indexing activities in Italy.

Register.it launches pre-registration procedure for .eu TLDs

2005-06-23T09:20:00.000+01:00

Milano, June 23rd 2005 – Register.it leader on the Italian market of web site hosting, online visibility and part of the DADA Group has been officially authorised by EURid to accept preliminary registration of .EU TLDs as of today

Register.it is currently accepting pre registration of .EU TLDs free of charge at

http://we.register.it/domains/eu/

The offer is valid until August 31st 2005

Fight over Misspelled "Googl" Domain In Australia

2005-06-22T05:03:00.000+01:00

The Australian courts may determine who has the rights to misspelled versions of trademarked domain names. Accoording this story from ZNet a local Australian businessman bought the domain but the registrar decided to take it back as in their opinion it was an obvious misspelling of Google.
The businessman is now suing for the return of the domain and the decision of who has rights to misspellings in Australia will go to the courts.

Seekport expands it’s reach to the Italian community

2005-06-21T14:03:00.000+01:00

Seekport, the innovative European search engine which is already active in Germany, France, UK and Spain, expands it’s reach to the Italian community and launches seekport.it

Joachim Kreibich has answered our questions in a brief interview in connection with the launch of Seekport Italy:

1. Would you like to introduce Seekport - who is Seekport ? Where is Seekport based ? Is there going to be an office in Italy ?
Seekport is a pan-European search engine that provides an alternative to the US-based search engines that are dominating the market. We engage both in B2B as well as B2C activity. B2B means that we deliver search results to portals, publishers, ISPs, marketers etc. which incorporate our search functionalities in their online offerings. B2C is aimed at the end user - persons that want a high quality, country-specific offering with less spam and more relevant local content than what the US companies offer. Also, it is noteworthy that we are the only search company that already can offer vertical search - our users can choose if they want to search only in a certain thematic topic, and then only receive results from this category.
We are based in Germany, in Hamburg and Munich. Actually, the history of Seekport is closely connected to Infoseek - the persons involved are the same that made Infoseek to the most successful search engine in Germany in the beginning of the new century.

We have local index teams in all countries that we operate in, that ensure that the quality of the index is up to our standards and that the search results reflect the demands of the local country. Our teams are - next to Germany - in Paris, London, Madrid and now in Milano. At the end of the year, we will be present in 9 countries in Europe.

In Italy, we will start with a beta version, which will already incorporate the preview functionality. Other functionalities we offer will be introduced a little bit later, and we will also work heavily on the index in the beta phase. All users are welcomed to send us comments and suggestions.

2. Which is going to be the focus of Seekport - are your objectives a particular segment of the search market ?

See also above. We offer both general search as well as vertical search. Also, and very interesting for our B2B clients, we offer site and archive search, and this can be combined with the web searches, so that a B2B customer can display site or archive and web results on one page.

In general, we want to give our customers the best search experience possible. For example, in Germany we already offer various suggestions to make a search query more specific, so that the user really gets the search results he is actually looking for

3. Give us an overview of the main features of your search Engine

General country-specific or Europe-wide web search. Vertical (theme-oriented) web search. Example. A user is looking for virus. Now, this can be both virus as in computer virus, or health virus. If our user however chooses "Health" as his topic, he will only be displayed search results which deal with viruses such as HIV, hepatitis virus etc..

We will also offer clusters, query refinements etc. For our B2B clients, also the above-mentioned site and archive search are relevant.

4. The Seekport interface is geared towards country specific results. In Italy we have many English only web sites with a .it suffix - could you explain how you have organised country specific queries versus regional web sites ? Will for example .co.uk web site acquire a better visibility than .it ones if the user runs a search selecting the pages from a specific European country ?

In general, we aim to have search results that are very country-specific. Regarding your example: We know that the great majority of users searches in its own language, and prefers to have results that are in his language. This no longer is a problem, as there are now - at least in Europe - more than sufficient web pages to all topics in the local language. If a user wants to have more results, he can choose to search in all indices.

Now, if an Italian user looks for information in English and does not restrict his search to Italy, an Italian page will not be given a higher weight than a UK one. The results will be displayed by relevancy.

5. I have noticed that you are providing a free service called seekbot where you provide an analysis of a web site page - The results show that on page content is very important, even more important than the title tag - would you like to further elaborate the importance of on site factors compared to off site factors such as external links ??

I am sure that you will understand that we will not elaborate on our ranking algorithm. Many factors influence the positioning. But most certainly, the factors described in seekbot are important. Seekbot is a tool for the normal webmaster that might not know too much about what is important for placement in search engines in general, and might not be aware of what he should do as a minimum.

6. Spamdexing is a very serious issue all search engines are closely looking at to remove poor quality web sites - where does Seekport stand on this issue ?

We very much disapprove of spamdexing, and try to keep our index as free of spam as possible. This is why we have quality teams; these teams - among other tasks - try to keep up with what spam is present in the local countries, and take on countermeasures. Of course technology plays an important part in this.

7. You have introduced a very interesting preview window function that allows the user to view the web site before actually clicking on the link that would take him/her to the web site: Would you like to elaborate on this original implementation on SERPs ??

We think all features that help users evaluate if a search result might be relevant for him are useful. As mentioned above, we have various functionalities that follow this goal, and there will be more to come

8. What is Seekpot’s view on local search and geotargeting ?

Very important, and we are working on it

9. Will Seekport have a Directory ?

No, this is not planned. I would like to stress that our vertical search offering is not based on a directory, but on an innovative technology that analyses the web pages that are crawled and then assigns a "theme"/topic automatically. This is an advanced technology, which we have registered for a patent

10. Can you give us any insight on your plans regarding Pay per Inclusion or Pay Per Click programs ?

We will of course have a pay per click program on our site (after all, we need to make money), but not in the very beginning. Pay per inclusion is not planned.

Online Marketing Europe-A Conference not to be missed!

2005-06-18T22:41:00.000+01:00

Have plans for June 22nd-23rd?

Well, if you are serious about online marketing in Europe, you should be booking to Mallorca, Spain, to take advantage of the first Online Marketing Europe (OME), an International Congress and Exhibition for online marketing.

According to OME’s website, the conference “caters for many different fields including Online Marketing, Mobile Marketing. e-business and purchasing agents for the Media sector as well as technical service providers.” With a special focus on tourism and online payment systems, the exhibition will host some of the most renowned European companies and speakers:

Bruce Hoang-Interactive Advertising Bureau
Holger Kamin-Zanox
Alberto Díaz-Yahoo
Laurence Fontinoy-Ebay
Miguel Esteban-24/7 Real Media
Stephan Musikant-Ciao AG
Joan Grau-Media Contacts
Miguel de Reina-Google
Stéphane Cordier-AdLink
Dirk Freytag-ADTECH AG
Michael Stusch-EasyAd
Christian von Hammel-Bonten-Wired Card AG
Juan Carlos Fernández-Overture
Dr. Dorothee Ritz-MSN
Pablo Foncillas-Spainair
Dominique Loumaye-Espotting
Antonio Batanero-Sol Melia
Nils Hachen-denkwerk
Jens Leinert-Webtrade
Eric Urdahl-Web.de
Ingo Lippert-MindMatics AG
Marcos Luengo-Lastminute.com
Marco van Sterkenburg-Bibit Global Payment Service
Dimitrios Haratsis-Eprofessional
Aquilino Peña-Wanadoo
Stefan Kipp-Hotel Reservation Service
Thomas Hille-T Online
Manuel Lopez-Planeta Web
Victor Navarro-Victornavarra.com
Mike Beattie-Sepomo
Andreas Stefanis-Pago eTransaction Services GmbH
Dr. Thomas Gerteis-Global Media GmbH
Morten E. Wulff-TraceWorks
André Boeder-easyDebit ePayment GmbH
Joshua Novick-Antevenio
Gustavo Nuñez-Nielson/NetRatings
Juan Diego Oliva-TradeDoubler
Gabriel Pieras Coli-Sa Nostra
Marcus Koch-BVWA

Some of the agenda highlights include Miguel de Reina’s (Google’s Country Manager Spain & Portugal) presentation on search engine marketing and search engines as the motor of world tourism; Miguel Estaban from 24/7 Real Media will focus on search engine optimization and Eric Urdahl from Web.de will discuss: “One Step to European Diversity: European Targeting Solutions for European Sales and Media Campaigns.” The tourism industry will be in the spotlight, with presentations from Media Contacts, Lastminute.com, Sol Melia and others.There is plenty to hear for online marketing professionals. For example, in his presentation, Juan Diego de Oliva from TradeDoubler will concentrate on the importance of return on investment in online marketing campaigns: “Are you squeezing the most out of your online marketing budget? Improving your Online ROI across Europe.” For a closer look at the agenda visit the OME website, offered in 3 languages.

What makes this international online marketing congress stand out, are not only its eminent speakers, but its specific concentration and unique focus on online marketing on Europe.

Spain breaks the mark--number of high speed connections grow

2005-06-18T12:23:00.000+01:00

According to the Internet User Association (AUI), at the end of May, Spain reached 4,034,317 internet users with high speed internet connections; 3,124,517 users opted for DSL and 873,000 rely on cable connections.

Not surprisingly 80% of these connections originate from urban locations and 50% off all connections come from Madrid and Barcelona. To continue the trend, AUI maintains that prices will need to continue to drop. On average, a DSL connection in Spain costs 45 euros, incomparable to other European countries, where the user pays less and receives more (connection speed).

According to a study performed by Tatum, a Spanish commercial and marketing consulting firm, with 14,445,289 internet users, Spain has now taken 12th place in the world.

Sources:

La Razon Digit@l
NoticiasPyme
MinutoDigital

PayPal Speaks Spanish

2005-06-18T11:47:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago, PayPal took on yet another frontier, as they launched their services in Spain. 250,000 Spanish users were already taking advantage of this practical payment method in English. Now they will be able to enjoy the service in their own language (www.paypal.es), much like in the U.K., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Italy and France.

PayPal will be offering customer support to their Spanish customers and in the very near future will provide a buyer protection program, which in other EU countries provides 400 euro coverage in case the buyer does not receive the product they have paid for.

The service will initially be used to support Ebay España transactions, although PayPal promises that they will open the service to other online operations.

With e-commerce spending up 20% since last year, this is a timely move.

Sources:

entreBits
CincoDias
Navegante

Spanish E-Commerce: Optimistically on the rise

2005-06-18T09:41:00.000+01:00

In a recent study, Red.es and the Spanish E-Commerce Association (AECE-FECEMD) have come to some very exciting conclusions about the growth of e-commerce in Spain. While 1,837 million euros is relatively modest in comparison to European counterparts, the number indicates a 20% increase from last year’s internet consumer spending.

The second study of its kind, shows that nearly 4,000,000 (11.2 % of the Spanish population) over the age of 14 are making online purchases, leaving behind an average of 464 euros per person (an increase of 6%). Since last year, the number of internet users, converted into online customers has increased by nearly 500,000.

The director of Red.es, Ramon Palacio, recognized that the numbers still leave plenty to look forward to, but because average Spanish consumer falling under the young, mid-upper class and educated label, there is hope that Spain will soon join the rest of the European (EU) crowd.

The study underlines a recurring obstacle: In Spain people continue to feel uncomfortable and insecure buying online, while there is really no reason for them doubt the security of the transactions. 28% still feel uneasy about the payment process and 20% are reluctant to give out their personal information online. Nevertheless, online transactions are relying more and more on the credit card (65.4%), while the popular COD method has progressively declined(18.5%).

On the other hand, 58.9% recognize that the reason they did make an online purchase was because of the comfort and simplicity of buying online; 27.2% believe that buying online opens the door to more competitive prices and promotions and 18.1% claim that they are able to access a much wider selection of products.

Although minor (1%), there was even an increase in international transactions—52% of their online spending goes to international businesses. The reason behind these numbers, of course is a wider selection and lack of these products in Spain. While the increase is small, the implications are not to be taken lightly.

The leading, in-demand products? That is no surprise. Travel, electronics and books are the persistent forerunners; 30.4% of total spending went to airline, bus and boat tickets, 14% to electronics, and 12.7% to books.

80.4% of survey takers admit that their online purchase experience has met their expectations--the potential for continuous growth is more than abundant, but as Red.es and AECE underline: the key lies in educating and encouraging the average internet user to feel more confident and comfortable with online transactions.

For more interesting data, download the complete B2C Ecommerce Study 2005 (in Spanish).

Sources:

Red.es
AECE
CincoDias
MarketingDirecto

Scary Non-Privacy Issues in Europe

2005-06-16T05:19:00.000+01:00

CNet reports in this article that though the European Union government failed to adopt Privacy legislation, requiring ISPs to record all electronic communication, it seems the individual countries have decided to implement the laws.

As the article mentions "U.K. communication service providers already retain data on customers' phone calls, e-mails and Web behaviour for one year, thanks to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act."

.EU Registrar Accreditation

2005-06-14T17:19:00.000+01:00

Starting 11.00 (CET) on 16 June 2005, the European Registry of Internet Domains we will begin to accredit .eu registrars

Web Agencies liable for trademark infringements on .it Domain Names

2005-06-14T13:55:00.000+01:00

A recent ruling of an Italian court has caused turmoil in the online industry. A maintainer was tried and found guilty of setting up a domain name on behalf of a customer, who was infringing trademark laws of a well-known enterprise operating in Italy.

In the online search industry the domain name may become a relevant part of the search strategy: keyword-rich domain names have been known to be favoured by search engines, giving them the ever-so-slight advantage on competition. It is not uncommon to seek a local presence by setting up a new local domain to acquire visibility.

The procedure to set up an .it domain name involves 3 parties:

The Italian Registration Authority (NIC.it)
A Provider/Maintainer
The end user

A maintainer is typically a web agency or internet provider who deals directly with NIC.it. The end user is required to undersign a formal request of activation (called la lettera di assunzione responsabilità). The maintainer is required to follow a technical procedure to finalise registration.

The provider/maintainer, formally considered neutral in the process, is now held responsible and accountable for damages caused to others should infringements on registered trademarks be raised by a 3rd party.

The court identified providers/maintainers as an active party in setting up a domain name. By registering a domain name that relates to a registered trademark, the sentence identified the actions of the provider/maintainer similar to those of a “counterfeiter”.

The judge defined domain name purchasing as a typical entrepreneurial activity where risk is involved: Providers/Maintainers requesting the activation of a domain name, possibly a registered trademark, are being warned: You are liable for trademark infringements in Italy.

Spanish newsletters on crutches

2005-06-14T12:57:00.000+01:00

Internet marketing and e-commerce is really taking off in Spain. But one cannot argue that it is not a bumpy road with plenty of room for improvement. In their study, Netyidea, a Spanish internet marketing strategy firm, who analyzed Spanish e-newsletters from two points of view, (1) the newsletter as a valuable user experience and
(2) the newsletter as an instrument of customer loyalty, has come to a rather disappointing conclusion:
Spanish companies are not as conscious as they should be about the importance of newsletters to securing customer loyalty.

After signing up for a newsletter, a mere 65% actually receive one, while the other 35% are left with a truncated relationship. During registration, when collecting potential customer data, 58% of businesses settle just for the email address, making it impossible to segment their user base and personalise newsletters, correspondence and advertisements.

61% of newsletters aim to generate direct client response, while the remaining 39% are used purely for branding purposes. Despite their objectives, Spanish companies are leaving plenty of room for improvement during the entire cycle of newsletter mailing (from customer data collection, result analytics and strategic improvements).

Not measuring the effectiveness and performance of their newsletters is truly the most detrimental flaw. Only 40% of newsletters arrive with a mechanism that measures whether they have been opened at all. 52% are measuring actual click throughs, and only 35% include the necessary code to track the entire path taken by the user after opening a newsletter.

But there is no need to get discouraged; on the contrary, although occasionally stumbling, Spain is moving in the right direction.

China's Sohu Commits to Emphasize Search

2005-06-14T01:36:00.000+01:00

Sohu seems to have adopted the Avis moto, "We try harder." And, taking the global Google out of the mix, like the Avis, Sohu is China's number two search engine.

The Chinese government has tightened restrictions on internet companies, and search engines and portals in particular. With a ban on two of the largest income producing search areas; adult content and gambling, Chinese search companies need to reach out to other industries.

The interesting aspect of this is the non-capitalist Chinese may have to embrace their antithesis.

Greek Internet Usage statistics

2005-06-13T00:16:00.000+01:00

Half of the Greek youth (aged 15-29) are online. This is the one of the main findings of a recent report based on the profile of the new generation provided by the Department of Communication and Mass Media of the University of Athens. Taking into consideration that the current internet penetration of the general population reaches a bit more than 20%, this is promising news for the .gr community, which has to be taken into consideration for future investments on the local internet market.

But what really are the characteristics of the Greek internet user? This is a question replied by the 2004 survey* conducted by VPRC on behalf of the Greek Government. According to the data provided, the main reasons** Greeks use the internet are e-mail (21.5%), information seeking for products and services (17.7%), information for news, weather etc (11.7), gaming (11.5%), music (9.7%), education (7.8%), information for Public Services (3.2%), online shopping (2.3%) and rest (14.6%).

From those people that use the internet, 81,3% declare that have not proceeded into any kind of buy through the web, while 18.7% have done so. Specifically, 81% of those who have made a purchase repeated the action within 2004. Greeks usually buy books (21.1%), PC hardware/software (17.2%), travel tickets (8.3%), CDs (8.2%), apparel (7.6%), services (5.8%), auto parts (5.7%), DVDs (5.6%), hotel booking services (3.8%).

The reasons behind their decision to buy online rest mainly on the convenience provided by the web (28.2%), Unavailability of specific products in the Greek market (28.1%), competitive pricing (26%) and variety of offered goods (10.1%). The average yearly amount spent per user reaches 1.114 euro and the charges are mainly billed through credit cards (58%).

Crossing to the other side, those that do not shop online project their own arguments: No trust on the billing system (34.5%), no need to do so (31.2%), cannot see/touch the product (20.1%) and no trust on shipping services (7.2%).

While this is the profile of the internet user/shopper, according to another survey provided by Eurostat, 87% of Greek SME (Small and Medium Size Enterprises) and 100% of large businesses take advantage of the internet.

Concluding, the Greek Government has undertaken a number of initiatives to educate and facilitate users while at the same time assisting companies both financially and by providing the infrastructure with the aim to promote and increase the usage on internet.

(* Full survey is provided in Greek only, here)
(** Survey respondents were able to choose one single reply for each category of questions)

Country-specific Links in Google Rise in Global SERPs

2005-06-12T18:37:00.000+01:00

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch forums discusses the improving positions of country-specific domains in the Google SERPs.

Whether this is a change in the algorithm or just that more international webmasters are developing increased links in the international community has yet to be determined. But the most insightful post discusses the fact that local inbound links have a big impact for results in that locality. If you are looking to improve your site for a specific country get links from that country - even non-topic specific links (though this I am going to test before taking it as a fact).

Ukraine: Internet Censorship?

2005-06-10T17:47:00.000+01:00

As the Ukrainian government has decreed the governing of websites by enforcing compulsory registration, before websites go online. This latest move has led to serious commotion among the local media, as well as Reporters Without Borders (RSF), who claim the decree is an infringement on freedom of speech and a giant leap towards internet censorship.

So far, obligated registration is practiced in China and Vietnam, notorious for their lack of freedom of expression and heavy censorship.

After the decree, adopted on May 18th, RSF is keeping a watchful eye on Ukraine, in fear that the country will fall victim to the same fate.

According to RSF, not only must websites register with authorities, but “to be allowed to appear, sites must not call for ‘a change of government through violence" or support "terrorism", not damage individuals' ‘honour’, ‘dignity" or ‘reputation’ and not post ‘swear words’ or pornographic content.”

For the time being, the Ministry of Transport and Communication assures the concerned organizations that registration of websites will only be compulsory for government websites.

The original decree, presented on April 27th, did in fact include both public and private sites, but apparently declared private websites optional, when it received severe criticism of an obvious attempt at internet censorship.

Sources:
Reporters Without Borders
Yahoo! News

Russian RSS Portal launched

2005-06-10T13:48:00.001+01:00

This week saw the launch of the first aggregation site for Russian RSS feeds, called Kanban.ru. In the same way as the popular Technorati or Bloglines service Kanban will work to become a central portal for the new RSS format.

Artyom Kashehlebov, Kanban project leader, explains in interview that it is important for people to realise that RSS is far more than simply news. They will be actively collecting blog, weather and other resource feeds through this site. The project is focused on encouraging a strong community through voting and comments on individual listings.

Artyom welcomes the marketing possibilities of RSS, “In the future we see income being generated from paid services and the new kinds of advertising it offers. We are working on this now”

A Video a Day keeps Digital Divide Away

2005-06-10T13:48:00.000+01:00

Starting June 13th TgBlog will broadcast daily a 30" video on the Internet for those wanting to use it but don't know where to start.

TgBlog focus is information and useful tips on how to make the web part of everyday life to find a job, travel, listen to music and find useful information.

China Requires Blog and Site Registration

2005-06-09T18:58:00.000+01:00

The freedom of the web is limited by the country it is connected to these days.

As the article from Reporters Without Borders tells us China now requires every blogger and webmaster to register their online presence.

China appears to be leading the way in Internet despotism. Though the Chinese government is suggesting 75% jumped to and registered, I find that hard to believe. It is more likely the governemnt has a much lower number for Chinese based websites.

The funny thinng about this annoucement is that it comes at a time when big internet businesses are pushing into the Chinese market. Hopefully capitalism will help erode confidence in the Communist regime and eventually things will change.

El País Online: News for Everyone

2005-06-09T12:00:00.000+01:00

Two and a half years ago, El País, the most read newspaper in Spain, began a paid online subscription service that baffled everyone. Anyone without a subscription was unable to walk past the headlines found on the homepage. After over two years of a very involved marketing campaign and considerable growth in subscriptions, on June 3rd, Elpais.es has once again opened its doors, eliminating any fee requirements to access their full contents. With so much useful information available online free of charge, clearly there is a very powerful reason behind the sudden change. El País claims that the decision for change comes with the evolution of the internet as a definite fountain of information.

Of course, something had to be done for the 45,000 subscribers that have been faithful to El País. El País will increase and improve the subscription services without a price increase. New services of added value will include: Unlimited access to Le Monde’s subscription service, ability to consult Agency EFE's real time teletypes with the main national, international, economic and sport news of the day; to follow the 24 hours, life CNN+ news, and to listen in on high quality radio emissions of Cadena SER, 40 Principales, Cadena Dial, M80 Radio, Máxima FM y Sinfo Radio.

The other advantage not to be overlooked--limited advertising. In fact, when a subscribed user signs in, all advertising considered to be intrusive, is eliminated.

"We are convinced--explained CEO of Prisacom, Manuel Mirat--that the internet media leaders must combine a free service, open to all, combined with additional paid for contents and services. This is the tendency we are seeing in the sector and the model that we want to apply."

Sources:
CincoDias
IBLNews
¡Exception!

Spain is Catching Up: Regional .es domain registration simplified

2005-06-08T19:54:00.000+01:00

Until last week, registering a national .es domain name had not been very inviting. In fact, because of the excessive fees and bureaucratic requirements, an .es domain name has been so inaccessible that Spain has sadly found itself far behind the rest of the European countries in the number of national domain names registered. Last January, Spain had 86,153 .es domains, while Germany (5.45 million), United Kingdom (3.87 million), Netherlands (1.33 million), and Italy (1 million) lead the pack.

In a move to promote the use of the national domain, the Spanish government has now made registration a whole lot easier. In fact, they hope that the decrease in obstacles, as well as a mammoth 71% drop in the fees, will boost registrations and reach the projected goal of 400,000 within the next four years.

The government will deliver registrations through Red.es, a government branch, with the help of Arsys, a private domain name registration company and will promote registrations through a special guide which will explain the new simplified conditions, and the exact dates when they will take effect.

June 7th marks the start of the first phase, wherein all public and administrative agencies are now able to take advantage of the new process. The second transitory phase, between September and October, will open registration to commercial names, registered trademarks, denominations of origin, company names, foundations, associations and others with intellectual property rights.

All others will have to wait to register during the very last phase, which in all likelihood will culminate in a frenzy of registrations starting November, at a much more affordable price of 27.59 Euros. Of course, the price tag will be even more appealing, when registering through a domain name registration agency.

In order to register a .es domain name, the applicant will have to show that (s)he has ties to Spain. There are even plans to create a judicial system to resolve any conflicts that may arise, now that registering any .es domain is much more accessible. More information can be found by downloading the domain name registration guide (in Spanish) or by accessing Esnic, a branch of Red.es in charge of domain name registrations.

More exciting yet, is the .eu domain which will be available for registration starting this October. Like the .es domain, after going through the first two phases, full, unlimited registration will open to all residents of the European community, starting February of 2006.

Sources:
Noticiasdot.com
Red.es
Expansion.com
Consumer.es

More on Opodo in Spain: Rumbo in the picture

2005-06-08T19:19:00.000+01:00

Like their entrance into eight other countries, Opodo dived into the Spanish market, forming an alliance with Rumbo, an already established and unquestionably successful giant. In conjunction the two companies have plans to maintain the joint effort until they reach a 10% market share, projected to happen within the next three years. While they will act as two separate companies, there is always the possibility of a much closer relationship, including fusion or acquisition.

In an interview, Simon Vicent, CEO of Opodo, said that their strategy in Spain will involve several phases. Initially, they plan on working actively to establish the Opodo brand in the market. Following that they will evaluate their progress and introduce new products.

When asked about the growth of the online tourism market in Spain, Simon Vicent, responded that the market is growing, especially for users between the ages of 26-45 years old. Opodo believes that one of the biggest driving forces in the online travel industry are the low cost airlines, 81% of whose reservations are made online. There are already 34 low cost airlines that fly in and out of Spain. In fact, the entire online travel reservations market in Spain is now worth 620 million euros.

Rumbo's Managing Director, Ignacio Martos agreed that the alliance between the two companies will also benefit Rumbo in other European markets. Rumbo will be providing all of the technical support for their strategic partner, while Opodo will take care of the marketing and promotion of products in different countries. Both companies agree that within the next four years, 77% of airline tickets will be sold online.

Source:
CincoDias
Baquia

Wi-max services in Italy starting 1st July

2005-06-08T08:30:00.000+01:00

The Italian Minister of Telecommunications Mario Landolfi has announced the launch of Wi-max («Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access») starting next July. Wi-max will be available for an initial 6 month period on an experimental basis, in a limited number of regions, and selected cities (Piemonte, Sardegna, Siciliy, Valle d'Aosta and Abruzzo, the cities of Rome, Milan, Arezzo and Parma).

Wi-max represents an excellent opportunity to leapfrog towards a networked society, especially for the rural areas where broadband internet access is rarely available.

Reported by: Il Corriere della Sera

Opodo moves into Spanish

2005-06-06T21:57:00.000+01:00

Big brand Opodo has moved into its ninth European market with the launch of www.opodo.es. Opodo is already well established in the UK, Germany and France - and already entered the Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish markets in early 2005 through two acuqisitions - Eviaggi and Travellink.

Reported by Travel Daily News

Google to develop Israel

2005-06-06T20:05:00.000+01:00

According to Israeli newspaper - Haaretz - Google is looking to open an office in Israel and to build its network of partners in the country.

Haaretz - Israel News - Google to launch Israeli subsidiary, challenging local Internet portals

Yandex: PPC and Online Advertising in Russia

2005-06-02T13:27:00.000+01:00

Russia is one of those rare areas in the world where Google does not rein supreme. According to Liveinternet, the popular public statistics site, Yandex.ru holds a leading market share of 55-60% with Google trailing at 5-6%. Their own published figures show a similar story. While the engine resembles Yahoo! in their portal services, their strong reliance on algorithms has drawn many comparisons to Google.

Diana Moldavsky, Senior Account Manager at Yandex, explains "Yandex is aimed at all Russian-speaking users, both in Russia and abroad. We welcome businesses from all over the world who would like to target a Russian speaking audience."

This is an important point often overlooked when marketing internationally; using a specific language search engine can open a channel to those speakers in all countries, including your own. There are 275 million Russian speakers in the world, an estimated ¼ million in the US alone, making it the fifth most spoken language.

Diana outlined the official Yandex submission policy, "Our robot is always looking for new sites that fit our criteria. So a webmaster can just wait for the robot to get to his/her site or to speed it up he can add the site himself by going to our submission page at http://webmaster.yandex.ru/. We want submissions from abroad only if the site has Russian language pages or English language but Russia related pages."

Yandex now welcomes PPC advertisers from outside the country through their Yandex Direct system. The system is similar to the current offerings from Google and Yahoo!, showing adverts to the right of the main listings and bid for in the same way. The system works by matching exact keywords, whilst considering Russian language morphology, rather than a broad matching system.

The click through rate for pay per click is similar to the organic listings, says Diana, "We have found that, depending on the search query, the CTR for the PPC ads compares favourably with the organic CTR. In the worst case it may be approximately half that for the organic listing."

On the rather hot topic of click fraud which has caused a headache for the other major PPC providers, she was understandably more reserved, "We do monitor clicking patterns for each ad and in case of suspicious clicks we do not charge advertisers for them. Clicking patterns are analyzed with our proprietary software."

That system seems to be working well, as Denis Lebedev, director of Ivdesign.ru explains, "One trick at the moment seems to be to copy our advert link and place it on a popular website, each time the page loads we get a click. We can see this in our referral logs. Yandex has not charged us when this has happened."

This trust is encouraged by the zero tolerance policy that Yandex has towards those trying to abuse the system. They actively encourage spam and abuse reports from their users through online reporting. Explains Denis, "The reporting process is very effective; sites are removed from the index within 5 days."

Yandex do not go as far as to provide IP data on the clicks advertisers receive although they acknowledge that this maybe something they do in the future. Another point being considered is extending Yandex Direct to give a contextual advert program for websites, similar to Google Adsense.

As a market leader, these moves by Yandex are helping to push online advertising in Russia to a new level. As was the case in the UK and US, online advertising so far has been largely limited to banners. Diana explains, "Our evaluation of search adverting in 2004 was $17-18m (compared to $25m for banner advertising). In 2005 we expect search engine advertising to overtake banners."

There is a high growth potential in the Russian market. The most recent research by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) shows that the Internet audience in Russia at the start of 2005 is still only 16% of the population (17.6 million people). Over the year that is a growth of 20% with daily audiences increasing by almost 50%. To place this in context, Russia has more internet users than Spain (16m), Australia (11m) or Sweden (5m) while having one of the lowest users to population ratios in the world.

Number of Internet Users in the following countries, in millions - taken from the FOM Report 'The Internet in Russia - available online

Although Yandex has a strict policy on spam they do have a healthy relationship with local SEO/SEM professionals - much more complementary than antagonistic in this growing market. Diana stresses, "We are for SEO when they consult site owners and make sites more visible for search engines. I'd also like to mention that a lot of SEO professionals are reasonable advertisers and are happy to use Yandex Direct."

Seekport launches Spanish search engine just for Spain

2005-05-31T12:59:00.000+01:00

Seekport - the German-born search engine, which recently moved out of beta in the UK as reported in this blog, has launched a Spanish site for the Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician languages - just for Spain.

The company's strategy is to produce spam-free results by using human editors to improve their quality. In the case of Spain, the editorial team will be ensuring that results from Latin and South America are removed from the results - with web sites using the .es domain most prominently displayed.

Seekport says it has appointed a Spanish editorial team and opened offices in Madrid. The search engine is currently located at www.seekport.com.es - but as soon as the 100%-owned Spanish subsidiary has been created - it will move to www.seekport.es.

The company is planning a launch in Italy for the end of June which will mean the company is "Online in the most important European countries," says CEO Joachim Kreibich, "Nevertheless, this year we will also be launching in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe."

Seekport Internet Technologies GmbH Press Story in German

Google opens office in Norway

2005-05-31T07:49:00.000+01:00

Norwegian news site Digi.no reports that Google have opened an office in Oslo, Norway. So far the office only employs one, Mr. Jan Grønbech. Grønbech is the former boss of ad giant DoubleCLick (Adlink). However Google employs another 3 people, who are all in Google European headquaters in Dublin Ireland.

Grønbech's new title is "Vertical Head" and apparently he will heading up the Norwegian office, but also will play a role in starting up real representation in Denmark. Google is already represented in Sweden and so far 5 people work in their office in Stockholm.

Grønbech explains that he will be busy a man as his primary job will be working with the big clients on Adwords and that the opportunities are wide open as only 6-7% of online advertising are being spend on search in Norway and 9% in Sweden - while it's a whopping 42% in the UK. Grønbech estimates that it will rise to 30-40% in Norway within a very short time.

Google had a long time dispute over the Google.no domain, which was owned by a Norwegian sunglasses company before Google claimed right on the domain. Google lost the first case, but came out on top eventually and won the right to the domain. On the WayBackMachine you can see the sunglass site as it looked in November 2002.

Italians and the Internet

2005-05-30T18:09:00.000+01:00

According to recent EUROSTAT research, the internet in Europe has reached an estimated 89% of enterprises and 50% of the population. Italian industry is in line with the European average, but Italians are not connected as much when compared to other European citizens.

The report shows only 31% of Italian households are connected and regularly using the Internet, similar to Eastern European countries such as Lithuania and Poland.

The difference is most likely due to the higher prices of ADSL connections which on average differ by a factor 3 (in excess) when compared to equivalent Broadband subscriptions sold in France or Germany.

Another negative factor contributing to the “Italian Digital Divide” is the absence of ADSL connectivity outside of major cities: It is common to find important suburbs and entire towns slightly beyond the reach of ADSL nodes.

Souces:

Rai.it
Beppegrillo.it

Broadband brings cinema to Italian living rooms

2005-05-28T17:07:00.000+01:00

Rosso Alice, a TELECOM ITALIA Company, has announced it will be offering online film vision before films reach Italian cinemas and movie theatres, thanks to an agreement with Mikado, starting June 22nd.

TELECOM ITALIA has upgraded all ADSL connections to 1.2 Mbit/s and promised an even further increase to those subscribing to the Rosso Alice profile up to 4 Mbit/s, allowing Video on Demand.

In an attempt to attract the younger and more demanding audience, TELECOM ITALIA has also announced a partnership with Mtv called 'Mtv on demand' a new channel created for the online distribution of music.

Rosso Alice Provides Films in Pay Per View, gaming, and Music and is re-shaping the traditional multimedia industry in Italy. A flat broadband ADSL subscription to the Interent in Italy ranges between € 26,00 and € 40,00 per month.

ANSA

France presents the facts about the French and technology in California

2005-05-27T12:59:00.000+01:00

A fascinating article in Silicon.com tells of France trying to change its 'image problem' in the world of technology. Thus is revealed some interesting information about French culture - and France's place in the world:

France has a higher percentage of 20 to 29 year olds with qualifications in science or technology than the UK or US.
Start-ups qualify for an 8-year income tax holiday!
France is the third-largest recipient of foreign aid and the fourth largest exporter.
10 of the world's 100 largest companies are based in France.

France grapples with its image problem - silicon.com

Yahoo Scandinavia opens the doors again

2005-05-26T13:27:00.000+01:00

After closing their local sites 1.5 years ago, Yahoo has once again opened up to local users in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The local sites have a very similar look and feel to the US site, but one major difference is the absence of the directory.

At the time of posting, there are signs that the directory will not return to Scandianvia and so far no signs of local Surfers (Yahoo's editors) have been spotted. Running and maintaining a quality directory is of course a heavy manual task and with the relatively small population in these countries in mind, one cannot blame Yahoo for not continuing to keep the directory afloat. The last few years of actively running Yahoo Scandinavia, Yahoo spent quite a lot of money .

Interesting and refreshing of course that the local search is back (and quite good for that matter), but with a mild aftertaste as it was the once the great directory that made Yahoo!

Have at look at Yahoo Denmark, Yahoo Sweden and Yahoo Norway.

Das Keyboard UberGeeks only

2005-05-26T12:34:00.000+01:00

Looking for a posh hi-tech keyboard ?? Metadot Corporation from Austin Texas introduces the keyboard defined as "Only For the Best". What makes it so different from the others ?? It bears no inscription on the keys - 100% blank ... could be a useful solution for multilingual search marketers!

Metadot Corporation: Das Keyboard

Italian families invest in Broad Band Internet Connections

2005-05-26T11:14:00.000+01:00

A new report called 'e-family-2005' of the Association Federcomin, shows more and more Italian families are investing in broad band connections to the internet. An increase has been registered in digital cameras, DVDs, satellite connections, and broad band internet access. The study shows a significant drop in purchasing of PCs and cell phones. Italians are also showing less interest for video game consoles. Fax and answering machines are "obsolete"

ANSA: Famiglia e Nuove Tecnologie

Google's desktop tool goes multilingual

2005-05-26T08:14:00.000+01:00

The Google blog has announced that the desktop search tool is now available in a wider range of languages comprising of French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese and Korean.

Google Blog: Speaking of search

Multilingual search to recruit 12 new contributors, says blog editor

2005-05-25T16:07:00.000+01:00

Multilingual search is to increase its coverage of European and world news by adding additional contributors to its roster, says Editor Andy Atkins-Krüger.

"The news blog was launched almost 3 months ago and has come a long way in a short time.

"Our aim was to bring not-in-English search matters to an English-speaking audience and to act as a catalyst for greater growth - particularly in the European market.

"We're already covering stories that most other blogs pass over and have had a fantastic response from corners of the globe we didn't expect to reach.

"We also recruited great volunteers to add depth to our story finding with Sante Achille from Italy, Laszlo Fazakas from Hungary and Nick Wilsdon from Russia.

"Now we want to recruit another 12 contributors with a passion for mutlingual search who will help to ensure that Multilingual Search is the leading source for search engine information and statistics - when its not in English!"

Volunteers should use the normal contact form.

Multilingual search engines, European internet usage statistics, search marketing, international growth traffic

Greek web users to have 'Greek' domain names from July 4

2005-05-25T15:33:00.000+01:00

The Greek alphabet is to make its way into Greek domain names from July 4, the country's telecommunications authorities EETT reported on Tuesday. The step is intended to increase the use of new technologies in Greece.

At the present time, Greek web sites only use the Latin alphabet for domain names - due to both technical problems and a lack of preparation by the registration countries, says the EETT.

Unfortunately for the Greeks, as with other non-Latin alphabets, the step is something of a compromise as the Greek characters have to be slotted in between the protocol (Http://www) and the country top level domain name (.gr).

The EETT says, "The measure should contribute to strengthening the Greek alphabet and give a new momentum to the use of new technologies". Not everyone in Greece knows the Latin alphabet and the recent Eurostat research, reported earlier in this blog, shows that Greece is behind when compared with 30 European nations.

Belgian web connections too expensive, says Belgian study

2005-05-25T13:55:00.000+01:00

Belgian web connections are more expensive than those in the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, the UK, Germany and Italy, says a study by Belga's Test Achat.

Reported by Expatica

Worldwide broadband penetration shows Netherlands romping ahead in Europe

2005-05-24T19:03:00.000+01:00

The far east still heads the league table of most broadband connected countries with South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan all in the top 6. The far east will overtake North America and Europe in the next few years for 'connected households', reports eMarketer.

Intriguingly Canada and four European countries help to beat the US into only 11th place.

Taking just Europe out of the figures, the Netherlands leads the way with Germany and Poland bringing up the rear:

1. Netherlands
2. Belgium
3. Denmark
4. Switzerland
5. Sweden
6. France
7. Spain
8. Finland
9. UK
10. Portugal
11. Norway
12. Austria
13. Italy
14. Germany
15. Poland

The Netherlands is the biggest jumper, says eMarketer, having moved ahead of Denmark and Belgium which beat it in 2004.

As with many statistics, the figures mask some local factors - such as the availability of ISDN which still sees significant levels of usage in countries such as Germany.

China will soon rank as the most broadbanded connected country in the world by number, even though the percentage penetration puts it still right at the bottom of the table.

The Global Broadband Market

Big Clique African-American search engine launches in 17 languages

2005-05-23T11:30:00.000+01:00

Mr. Olu, the Will Smith of search engines, has created a new search engine for the world - Big Clique - in fact covering 17 languages from day one an amazingly ambitious undertaking!

Big Clique claims to offer 'Just search...' and nothing else. The choice of languages is intriguing comprising English, Italian, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Russian, Belarusian, Malay, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. That looks like a list of some of the most commercially interesting languages - with one or two omissions (Norwegian and Danish, for instance) and one or two additions.

Pay per click advertising is by gRock Media Group Company.

Belgian 'social' search engine launches in French only

2005-05-23T10:44:00.000+01:00

BelSoc.org has launched a social search engine in the French language in Belgium focusing principally on professionals in the 'social-medical' sector.

Moteur Social claims to only feature pages from Belgium, in the social fields and principally in French language. More of a directory than algorithmic search engine, the intriguing thing about the project is its claim to have 'fewer' pages than other engines - implying that a smaller targeted index will produce a more accurate result.

Moteur social (Be)

Excite Italia Acquired by Ask Jeeves

2005-05-20T16:57:00.000+01:00

Excite Italia is now officially part of Ask Jeeves Inc. Tiscali, a major European Internet Company, had acquired 70% of Excite Italia in March 2001, and purchased the residual 30% in April 2002.

The value of the acquisition is estimated to be € 10 million. The disposal of Excite Italia is yet another step of Tiscali in their consolidation and focus on core business.

Ask Jeeves acquires Excite Italia and by doing so expands into Europe, adding an estimated 3 million users per month. Ask Jeeves owns the Excite trade mark worldwide, but so far was not present in Europe.

Wall Street Italia

China has 98.8 million Internet users - ready for the invasion of the US majors.

2005-05-18T19:43:00.000+01:00

China is a large country. So even a small percentage of web users produces a big number - 98.8 million users according to an official in the Ministry of Information. Not surprising then that the leading US web-based businesses are falling over themselves to get into the Chinese market.

Just yesterday, Amazon announced its plans to expand in China having bought Joyo.com back in September. At the end of last week MSN announced a joint venture with the Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd, Ebay declared its interest and this followed Google's approval to open an office in Shanghai.

We should all be looking to China it seems....

People's Daily Online -- China has 98.8 million Internet users

Seekport continues its European roll-out with launch in the UK

2005-05-18T18:42:00.000+01:00

The German search engine Seekport has moved its UK search engine out of Beta. Seekport launched in the UK in December and claims to offer more UK-oriented results - partly thanks to a team of editors who quality check the engine's results.

Testing of the algorithm suggests that it operates quite differently to other the American search engines currently producing results which seem odd. As far as Web Certain tracking of UK web sites is concerned, Seekport hasn't yet made it onto the radar and it will need some heavy promotion if it wishes to increase its share of the UK market.

Reported by....Netimperative - Seekport UK moves out of test phase

Search marketing seminar - Imitiki - to take place in Lyon sponsored by Google

2005-05-18T09:16:00.000+01:00

ImiTiki - the search marketing conference brand which normally runs conferences in Paris, is to run a seminar for the first time in Lyon sponsored by Google. The seminar will be on the 16th of June with the morning focusing on organic search techniques and the afternoon on Google's adwords.

Reported by Abondance

New Saudi Arabian search engine in English launches in Beta

2005-05-16T11:06:00.000+01:00

The Saudi-based Dar Al Riyadh Holding Group has launched a new beta version English-speaking search engine built by Tajseed Solutions.

Deepy has a look of Microsoft (that search button...?) and the now standard Google format. However, it has a very neat spelling feature which corrects you as you type.

This may seem innocuous enough - but if English is not your mother tongue and the world's information is largely recorded in English and only findable by searching in that language - you'd appreciate some help with your spelling wouldn't you?

A report carried out in 2004 by Web Certain suggested that Arabic speakers, amongst other non-English mother-tongue speakers, found searching in English less than easy. Deepy may just have come up with a solution which may well be copied by others. Now that would be a good idea if search engines added accent correction to their none-English sites!

Reported by Abondance

Big businesses use the internet to buy, and they're all connected - Eurostat

2005-05-15T13:50:00.000+01:00

The official statistics body of the European Union - known as Eurostat - announced its 30 nation report on internet usage throughout Europe on Friday. Report author Morag Ottens, concludes "In most countries internet penetration has reached saturation point in large enterprises" - he also found that 48% of large European enterprises had purchased via the internet in 2004.

Key conclusions of the report are:-

Half of larger business buy via the internet
Virtually all European business are connected - even in the weaker economies
Small business are only marginally behind in their use of the internet
Men are greater users than women but this is narrowing in the younger age gaps
Broadband is rapidly becoming the method of choice for accessing the internet
Higher educational levels use the internet more
Younger age groups show internet usage more than double that of their grandparents

51% of men and 43% of women used the internet, as the chart below shows. Intriguingly, this gap is consistent across all countries with high and low penetrations of the internet with the notable exceptions of just Finland and Estonia where women are ahead across all age groups.

Large enterprises were 99% internet-connected - hence the 'virtual saturation' conclusion. Smaller businesses are marginally behind - except in the most active countries such as those in Scandinavia where they are almost alongside their larger colleagues. For large enterprises, only Estonia, Italy, Hungary, Norway, Bulgaria and Romania were below 99% - but even then the lowest figure was in Romania which still achieved 90%.

Chart shows use of the internet by individuals and enterprises - click to view.

There is a 16% gap between large enterprises buying on the web (48%) and smaller businesses (32%) - Morag Ottens comments that this is despite the fact that "Gains are expected to be made in terms of efficiency, competitiveness and achieving a wider customer base".

Chart shows large enterprise purchasing via internet - click to view.

The picture across the 30 nations varies only by degree with Scandinavian nations clearly in the lead for use by businesses whilst Germany, Austria, Estonia and the UK overtake Norway when consumers are considered to join the leading group of Finland, Denmark and Sweden .

Slovakia has an unexpectedly high figure of business use and Estonia is above average in terms of individuals. The tailing group in this study comprises of Italy, Spain, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Hungary and Portugal who are all below average on both business and consumer use.

Chart shows internet usage by individuals and enterprises by country in 2004

Conclusions

The report is already out of date, of course, as we have seen rapid increases already in 2005. It also covers all use of the internet - as opposed to the web - but what it does do is give a very clear picture that Europe offers a very rich market to be targeted via the web. One group which should take particular notice is business-to-business marketers - who now have great export opportunities open to them whether they are large or small.

The report covers an interesting basket of 30 nations ranging from heavy web users - Scandinavia - to future members of the European Union - including Turkey. Non-members of the European Union such as Norway and Switzerland are also covered.

The full report is available from Eurostat or you can contact Web Certain who will be pleased to forward you a copy.

German search engine Web.de to be bought by United Internet

2005-05-14T12:58:00.000+01:00

Web.de signed up to an acquistion by United Internet on Friday for 200 million Euros and a 5.8% shareholding in United Internet. The deal can't go ahead until it's been approved by the German monopolies office - it also still requires the approval of the Web.de annual general meeting. Report by Austrian TV's Futurezone site.

German search engines

The search marketing association EU goes for lift off

2005-05-11T16:42:00.000+01:00

For some months a group of search marketers around Europe have been drafting a constitution and plans for an association to represent search marketers.

Following the success of the SMA-UK, Mikkel deMib Svendsen and Andy Atkins-Krüger have been working with Sante Achille from Italy, Ben van den Bergh from the Netherlands, Olivier Guillo of France, Thomas Bindl from Germany and Laszlo Fazakas of Hungary to put the new association together.

Now the association has started the process to run elections for a committee and to recruit paying members!

See the press release on the SMA-EU site.

Spend per internet user in Belgium - lower than the UK and France

2005-05-11T11:08:00.000+01:00

An IAB Nederland study reported by Digimedia confirms earlier reports in this blog on Belgian statistics, that the market is somewhat lagging behind. According to the study, spend per person online during 2004 in France was 54 Euros, in the UK 42 Euros and Belgium just 8 Euros. The number of advertisers has gone from just 262 in 2003 to 529 in 2004.

A note of caution over the figures which appear not to fully cover the search market. Whilst the spend per internet user may not be wholly accurate, it seems clear from the comparisons that Belgium is not racing ahead at the same pace as its neighbours.

Belgian statistics take two steps forward

Dutch online advertising grows by 34% in first quarter of 2005

2005-05-11T10:52:00.000+01:00

The Dutch Interactive Advertising Bureau reports that the online advertising market grew by 34% in the first quarter of 2005 to 21.5 million Euros.

Emerce, which brings us the report, explains that the bureau brings together 18 organisations including TradeDoubler, MSN, Ilse, Lycos and Wanadoo but doesn't yet include Google or Yahoo, something which IAB Director, Igor Beuker, regrets. This means that the total turnover figure for the industry will be significantly understated.

Ask Jeeves to conquer Western Europe!

2005-05-10T21:09:00.000+01:00

CEO of Ask Jeeves has revealed to Reuters plans to roll out the butler throughout western Europe.

Following the IAC acquisition, Ask certainly has more capital at its disposal so it is not surprising to read speculation of a buy-out of Excite Italia from Tiscali, and Spanish expansion. Where next? The biggest single language web corpus which Ask could capture outside of English is German covering Austria, Switzerland and Germany as well as parts of Belgium and eastern Europe. If I were a betting man, that's where I'd put my money!

Press release service opens Hungary outlet

2005-05-10T20:53:00.000+01:00

GroupWeb.com has opened a new Hungary newswire service at www.hungarynewswire.com. The Budapest-based GroupWeb.com runs GroupWeb Emailwire.com.

58% of Israelis have an internet connection - only 10% via dial-up

2005-05-10T20:41:00.000+01:00

The Jerusalem Post brings us the news that Israelis are well connected to the internet with 73% of homes having a computer and 58% an internet connection.

The survey was carried out by the Tel Aviv University's Netvision Institute for Internet Research. Heavy users were found to be generally aged under 29. 43% of internet users access the web at least once a day.

Belgian internet statistics show women overtaking men!

2005-05-10T17:39:00.000+01:00

Women are now in the majority of web users in Belgium who access the internet at least once per month - up to the age of 34 that is! Overtall men still represent 55% of regular users and women 45%. The difference is in the age group between 15 - 34 where 1,120,000 women surf and 1,008,000 men - say reports from the Federale Overheidsdienst Economie.

The total number is 4.2 million - as previously reported. Men search more for adult, cars, computers, IT and Sport and women search for personal care, family and cooking. Men are more involved in PC banking and women send more e-cards, reports the Antwerp newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen.

Earlier Belgian statistics report...

Home grown pay per click service arrives at Russian search engine

2005-05-10T15:42:00.000+01:00

Russia's leading home grown search engine, Yandex , has launched a new pay per click service for Russia along the lines of the existing Google service.

Thanks to Nick Wilsdon of e3internet which brought us this story - Yandex so far having issued no public comment - as soon as they do we will bring you more...

According to Nick, Yandex operates in way more similar to Google than Yahoo.

Kuwait to launch arabic search engine

2005-05-10T13:24:00.000+01:00

The Kuwait News Agency - reported in the China-based online newspaper People's Daily Online - is to launch an arabic language search engine to archive arabic sites on the web.

The news was revealed by the Kuwaiti Director General of the country's Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the world information forum in Cairo.

Internet statistics from Belgium take two steps forwards

2005-05-06T08:47:00.000+01:00

Two organisations from Belgium - Insites and ISPA - which publish statistical information on the country's web use, are to join forces to deliver better information for web marketers.

Insites publishes the report known as the Belgium Internet Mapping twice a year. The latest figures - known as 'BIM 12' - were published in December and gave a figure of 4.2 million internet users with 49% of the Belgian population using the internet on a regular basis - in other words at least once per month. It also concluded that a limiting factor on the growth of Belgian web use, was computer penetration. It forecast a potential growth of web use to 57% of the population - but called for incentives to increase the availability of PCs.

BIM 12 also placed Google at the head of the search engine preferences of the Belgians.

The good news is that 85% of Belgians who access the web at home - do so through a fast broadband or cable connection.

ISPA's last internet study was published in February relating to the last quarter of 2004 and, whilst giving different numbers, largely reflected the Insite picture with broadband use reaching 80% of internet connections. The rise in web access, however, was largely static with a growth of just 2% overall (business 2.9%, home 1.8%). Just connections to broadband are increasing at a reasonable pace of 6.5%. In total, ISPA believes the total number of active connections to be just over 2 million.

Overall the picture in Belgium is currently one of relative stagnation - although comparative figures from elsewhere would suggest that increased broadband use means that more time is actually spent online - but neither ISPA nor Insite comment on this.

It is to hoped that the combined efforts of both organisations will enrich the data available to marketers targeting Belgium. We'll keep you posted.

Insites ISPA

Ask Jeeves to buy Italian search engine - Excite Italia

2005-05-05T15:34:00.000+01:00

Ask Jeeves is reported to be on the verge of buying Excite Italia from Tiscali for 10 million Euros. Ask was recently purchased by IAC and may well have deep enough pockets now to expand its linguistic offering. It only recently entered the Spanish market with its own Ask brand and this would be a very logical move into another southern European language area.

Finanza e mercati

Zoeken.nl creates 'special days' logos ala Google

2005-05-05T07:45:00.000+01:00

Dutch Cowboys tell us that Zoeken.nl has followed Google's lead in changing their logos to suit special days. Google changes its logo to reflect national days - but this means that their logo changes throughout the world. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch, has suggested that Google should create local identities for nationally important days. Zoeken.nl has spotted an opportunity to respect its own national presence in the Netherlands by doing just that.

The Dutch celebrate their liberation at the end of the second world war with two national days the 4th and 5th of May. The first of these of day of solemn commemoration, the latter a day of joy and celebration.

Thrifty.com goes into French, German and Spanish

2005-05-05T07:37:00.000+01:00

American car hire organisation, Thrifty.com, has translated its site into French, German and Spanish - a sign that more of the larger American travel organisations are recognising the need to speak the language of their customers.

Unfortunately, 75% of the page titles remain in English, as do the keywords and page descriptions so they've left something of a challenge for search engines to recognise the languages on the site.

37% of Austrians use the internet almost daily

2005-05-04T07:29:00.000+01:00

The Austrian Internet Monitor (AIM) has published its 2005 first quarter figures for use of the internet in Austria with further figures confirming the continuing growth in use of the web. This latest report particuarly reinforces the point that, as the internet becomes more accessible, the degree of daily use also increases with 37% of Austrian's over 14 now using the internet almost daily.

The first quarter of 2005 has increased by 2% in terms of access to the internet (66%), active use has increased by 1% overall (59%) - but intensive use has increased by 2% (46%). This seems to suggest that there is a move towards more active use by those who have access.

The total Austrian web audience is now 4,451,000, 3.3 million of which are accessing on a very regular basis. In the 14-19 age group, 93% have access to the internet.

Austrian Internet Monitor

The very first .eu domain name goes live

2005-05-02T20:59:00.000+01:00

The very first .eu domain has gone live on the web today - but don't get your cheque books out yet - this is the registration organisation itself - EURid at www.eurid.eu - which is responsible for managing the new European top level domain name.

Nevertheless, a significant milestone has been passed with the first .eu ever to function thanks to ICANN placing .eu in the web root directory!

Registrations of .eu domain names will be possible before the end of 2005 - with the registration agreement for registrars being published in all the languages of the EU before the end of May. However, there is a four month sunrise period to enable governments and priority organisations to organise their .eu domain names - so in reality .eu will only be open to all in 2006.

Should you buy a .eu domain name? Our advice is, if you operate in several EU countries - do! It may keep your domain name costs under control, protect your trademarks and mean that you are geographically located in the EU - and that means you should feature in the 'pages from...' results. Although that, of course, remains to be seen.

EURid

New French search engine Ketady launches

2005-05-02T19:23:00.000+01:00

A new search engine Ketady has been launched in France aiming to provide intelligent search results for users. The idea behind Ketady is that humans respond to humans - rather than machines giving approximated answers via algorithms.

A registration is required - and searchers questions are referred to 'experts' who carry out the necessary search and respond within a guaranteed 10 minutes - rather than 10 milli-seconds! That's excluding night-time, of course.

Using humans is not a totally new concept - but a 10 minute delay seems rather long. It will be interesting to see if the results make the wait worthwhile!

Ketady's news release

Google turns up the heat in French library battle

2005-05-01T18:52:00.000+01:00

Representatives of Google started a tour of the press in March to put forward the 'Google Print' plan - the project to digitally capture the world's libraries online, reports the French newspaper 'Le Figaro' in its online edition.

The Google print project aims to digitise over 15 million books and 4.5 billion pages of text from American and British libraries - and then to move on to the rest of the world.

On wednesday morning last, the tour reached France with the Director General of Google France meeting with 130 representatives of the French press. He put forward a 'contract' for the library project which it is aimed to have in place by September. It won't be possible, for instance, for a user to download the entire contents of a book and, in fact, the intention is for just 20% of each book to be online comprising table of contents, summaries, notes on the author, etc. Google will only digitise the whole work if the author has given permission.

It was also revealed at the press conference that although users will be able to access the information for free, book authors will receive a share of the revenue generated by advertising as a result.

One issue, reports Le Figaro, is that the contract proposed will be American and does not protect intellectual property rights in the same way as a French contract. Another French fear is that the library system itself in France will be threatened by the project.

One third of all Germans now shop online, says new study

2005-04-30T19:40:00.000+01:00

The Enigma Gfk research group in Wiesbaden has released figures which show that now more than one third of all Germans buy online. During the last year the number has grown by 15% to 23 million which is more than one third of the total population over 14 years.

Of web users, those who actually buy online has gone from 63% to 71% of the total. Most popular purchases are books, tickets for cinema, theatre and sporting events, then clothes, CD's, computer software and games. One of the strongest growth areas has been digital cameras, followed by entertainment electronics, and care accessories.

The study was carried out jointly with TNS Infratest of Munich and 1,035 German internet users were interviewed.