The Schengen agreement has been extended from 15 countries to 24 giving a wider borderless Europe with no internal border controls or checks and an open market of over 400 million people. Coming into force on the 21st December, the Schengen agreement makes physical inter-trade between bordering countries easier to manage for marketers. As Europe opens its borders, and search grows quickly in Europe, Schengen makes European business roll-outs more attractive and achievable with faster distribution and lower border costs.

The new countries joining the agreement are:-

• Czech Republic
• Slovakia
• Poland
• Hungary
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Estonia
• Malta
• Slovenia

I decided to test this with a visit to the most northerly Balkan state of Slovenia travelling from Austria through a 5 mile tunnel to the south side of the Alps. True enough the European blue flag and stars had become the standard border crossing notification and the rows of kiosks and border controls were empty and unmanned as we headed to the capital Ljublana.

Ljubljana is a town of around 230,000 people with a pretty baroque style and attractive old quarter. The local search engine is “Najdi” and the local domain is .si.

The Schengen agreement was first signed by five countries in 1985 in a small Luxembourg town ‘Schengen’ - these original five were later joined by ten others and the agreement came into force in 1995. The agreement basically means that the internal borders between the treaty countries are removed - but that those same countries cooperate to strengthen the outer border using the Schengen Information System - a database where data is exchanged. There are also special rules on how police forces work together.

The original five countries were:-

• France
• Germany
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• Luxembourg

Other countries which joined up to 1995 when Schengen was finally realised are:-

• Spain
• Portugal
• Greece

Countries who joined after 1995 but before 1997 are:-

• Italy
• Austria
• Denmark
• Norway
• Sweden
• Finland
• Iceland
• Monaco

The Schengen Agreement has only ever, in part, been deployed by the British or the Irish for fear of it encouraging immigration and terrorism - though it doesn’t seem to have helped much staying out.

This means that online advertising in Germany is still behind TV and print advertising - but from a growth rate point of view there is no comparison - online is taking off.

This story serves to back up the view that the European online market is growing very rapidly indeed. Germany is the largest economy in Europe and this pace of growth must eventually take it ahead of the UK. The figures don’t include the market in other German speaking countries and areas - such as Austria and Switzerland.

According to reports, the woman was buying the names to sell on to other parties at higher prices - nothing new in that then. EURid says that is has received complaints - not particularly new either. One key point is that only European-based organisations are allowed to hold .EU domain names.

Out-law carries this great quote from EURid, “When we screen our data bank we see that some people have an amazing amount of names. Nobody needs 10,000 names.” Strange. You’d have thought that EURid had a little more knowledge and insight about the industry in which they operate. Perhaps that’s why there were so many complaints at launch!

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language - but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list - and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment - for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting - perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway - but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr - even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case - contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical - hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

The companies concerned include Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and US firm Cingular. Combined, they have a user base of 600 million people - with some 20% in the UK expected to have broadband speed mobile phone access by the end of 2007.

According to The Telegraph, declining mobile phone revenues are forcing telecoms operators to look at all angles - and the lucrative search advertising market is clearly attractive. For telecoms operators it is very appealing to keep a larger percentage of the revenues rather than ’sharing’ with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

However, both Google and Yahoo have already done deals with mobile phone operators and it is not clear what impact this will have!

Following the search you have the option to refine your search by geography, person, company, language or publisher.

The project will develop along several lines:

• A systematic and rigorous data collection campaign that will produce reference datasets and make them available to the scientific community at large.
• The design and implementation of innovative techniques and tools for the analysis and mining of data.
• The construction and validation of modeling schemes for the observed phenomenology, involving the comparison of experimental data, simulation and theoretical constructions.
• The design and deployment of innovative, proof-of-concept tools aimed at better structuring and navigating information.

The kick off meeting was held on July 14th. The evolution of the project can be followed via the blog.

As Thomas writes, the implications for local search are significant. With multilingual searches and user reviews this can become a useful tool for companies marketing into the EU zone.

Germany | Spain | Italy

Of course this will also open up new opportunities for API mash-ups and help drive the Google brand in these areas. The results for Moscow are still some way behind the local engines (searching for hotels in Google against a hotel search in Yandex as an example) but as always, it will be interesting to watch this develop.

In the first day of trading in .Eu domain names, over 1.2 million active names were registered through the 1,000 accredited registrars according to EURid live statistics.

The UK lead in the first four hours - says EURid - however Germany soon overtook the UK.
Marc van Wesemael, Managing Director of EURid has expressed satisfaction at the progress saying, “We are satisfied to see that the interest in .eu has been so large and that many already regard .eu as a useful complement to Internet’s national top level domain names”.

Could President Chirac have had some influence over this? Will the French catch up later? We’re taking no bets.

Markus Eggensperger of Lycos claims that “It’s the most important top level domain we have ever seen,” and “Eventually the .EU could rival the .com”.

As we say in the UK, that’s probably “poppycock” but then you never know. Still noone can say how .EUs will affect search engine rankings as the use of .fr or .de has been a very easy way to identify the country of a particular site.

Go and get you .Eu - but don’t switchover today!

This however doesn’t mean - that the percentage of access has actually gone down - wonderful things statistics. Private access has increased from 43 to 48% (54% for men) between 2004 and 2005 - according to the report with broadband increasing from 15 to 23 in the same period. It’s just that Austria has increased a little more slowly relative to other countries.

Eurostat - which published the offending figures - says that 4 out of 10 Austrians have never used the internet. Shocking…

The search engine enables scientists, academics and researchers to discover relevant texts whatever language they are stored in - from one of the co-operating libraries. There is even a visual map view of the query terms!

So Google isn’t the only library cataloguing project!

France has a population similar to the UK and the Netherlands is much smaller than the UK so the UK is clearly underrepresented. Could it be that UK companies are not getting their act together and going to be caught out with other companies buying their domain names - or are the Brits simply not interested in Europe?

Whatever the case, time is rapidly running out for the .eu sunrise period and organisations would do well to check they are properly listed in the queue for their own domains. The period after 7th April is appropriately called the land rush period. Who will be caught in the rush….?

Multilingual Search announced the launch of Ask in Spain and the acquisition of Excite Italia - the addition of German and French are further key steps in the company’s necessary development in Europe if it is to represent anything akin to a serious European force.

Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, Inc explained in their release, “Germany has the greatest number of Internet users in Europe, with more than 42 million people online, and we believe it will be a very important market for the growth of Ask search technology and the Ask brand.

“By creating local sites in countries across Europe, we can offer users more relevant, localized search results. Ask Jeeves offers a world-class search experience to consumers, and we will leverage our differentiated approach to offer a superior search product for German Internet users.”

Malte Krueger is the business development director for Ask Deutschland. He says, “As the German search market grows, we believe that Ask Deutschland will be among the top players in the industry.

“Backed by Ask Jeeves search technology, the new site will offer more of what Internet users are looking for, from finding information on news, weather and entertainment to browsing the best shopping and travel sites.”

Ask Jeeves launches blog search in Japanese

Ask Jeeves business development director talks about plans for Europe

Ask acquires Excite Italia

Ask Deutschland ist da!

Ask Jeeves Launches Ask Deutschland: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

The priority for .eu domain names is being determined primarily on trademark ownership, followed in priority by other documentary evidence, such as company name or legal trading name. Government organisations and bodies will be rushed through the process ahead of everyone else. The .eu Registry will examine each application on it’s own merit and will refund failed applications, minus their administration fee of £11.

Advertisers targeting Sweden now have access to the pay per click services as well as index paid inclusion and other premium services.

Mike James, European Business Development Manager explained, “We’re rolling out the network throughout Europe but chose Sweden as one of our earlier destinations because it is a well developed market, broadband access is high and the Swedes are used to buying online. But we aim to cover all markets in Europe and will be launching in Italy in the next couple of weeks.”

Mirago has already built indexes in the UK, France, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Spain. The company expects to launch advertising facilities soon in all of those countries but has already opened in the UK, France, Germany and now Sweden. Italy will be next followed by Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway.

Mike James also explained that unlike Google, Mirago has built separate indexes for each country identifying sites using such factors as local domain names and other features which he wasn’t at liberty to reveal. Interestingly, he highlighted the fact that the company has built different methods of ‘normalising’ its results pages to deal with different language demands. “Swedish is different to French because it has full characters rather than accented characters which have to be treated in a different way,” he explained. “There is no danger of polluted results between the very similar languages of Scandinavia such as Danish and Norwegien because we have built separate indexes”.

Mirago has 15,000 active campaigns, handles 1/2 billion enquiries per month and has 700 partner sites which feed Mirago results - and it is actively talking to potential new partners in Sweden.

He expected more consolidation - but said that this depended on whether the industry “commoditised or personalised” its approach.

Speakers at the conference expressed the view that the search engines have become the new travel distribution system virtually replacing the dedicated GDS system.

Meanwhile, Expedia Europe director, Bruce Redor, attacked the meta-travel search engines. “I believe they bring greater choice,” he said but went on to heavily criticise the approach largely basing his argument on the fact that the travel inventory companies would not be able to cope with the scale of response needed. “Expedia handles 1,000 requests a second,” he said, “And that’s just for the flight path queries”.

Navneet Bali, formerly from e-bookers, is developing a new travel search engine or meta search tool in India under the brand Allcheckin.com. He believes that such travel search engines offer transparency and that customers are looking for that.

Google’s vertical market manager - travel UK - Daniel Robb - revealed that Google has undertaken a major pan-European study of travel search and will be releasing its findings in events throughout Europe in the next few weeks. For the UK, he said that 93% of travel searchers use Google, 34% Yahoo and 18% MSN. The study was principally based on existing Google users and demonstrates a multiple use of the engines.