“Aladdin is an open search engine platform,” said Li Yinan, Chief Technology Officer of Baidu, “we hope this platform could instantly meet all the searching demands of our users, just like the Aladdin’s lamp in the fairy story.” Li defines this plan as “the most technically challenging task” and more than 1000 core engineers of 2000 have been involved in the plan. “More engineers will be involved following the establishment of Shanghai R&D center,” added Li.

Sources: Trading Markets, ChinaStakes.com

Facebook and Twitter already have Japanese version and gaining Japanese users, but mixi and Gree are definitely the largest SNS sites in Japan.

Rakuten thinks that many business men/women in Japan received a customary December bonus on Friday the 5th, and researched online on Saturday before they made the purchase on Sunday the 7th.
Rakuten has been getting the average of 1.7 billion yen/day this year.

Yahoo! sites maintained its top ranking in October reaching more than 49 million visitors, followed by Google sites with 37.8 million visitors and Rakuten Inc. with 31.3 million visitors.

Read the complete report here.

‘Google is only relaxing the policy in countries where alcohol is legally allowed. Therefore, the advertiser can only target these countries ~ Singapore (the only countries in SE Asia), China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Australia. In addition, the targeted launch date is tentatively set on 12th January 2009 and not the 1st. In order to get the ads approved, it is best to send us the URL and TextAds so we can submit to Ads Approval to get them approved before launching campaigns with alcohol ads (non-family safe).

Only two years ago virtually no vertical search engines existed in the Bulgarian web. There were some rudimentary attempts at vertical search but they were either performing poor or were marketed badly. Interestingly enough, some of the first attempts were in the field of shopping search, despite the low penetration of online shopping.

Now there are about a dozen vertical search engines operating in the Bulgarian web and even international players have entered the field. Four types of search engines are on the market right now: real estate, comparison shopping, news and music.

Real Estate search engines:

Imotera.com
Propse.com

Comparison Shopping search engines:

Izgodnobg.com
Pazaruvaj.com
Cenite.com
Namerimi.com

News search engines:

Rss.bg
Alfarrss.com
News.jabse.com

Music search engines:

Mkfun.com
Dirimp3.com

Job search engines:

Rabot

Some of these are still not “true” search engines in the sense that they do not have a crawler but get feeded by RSS (Imotera.com, Pazaruvaj.com, Rss.bg, Alfarss.com). All of the search engines listed above are developed and owned by Bulgarian companies except Pazaruvaj.com, which is owned by the Hungarian company Arukereso.hu Ltd.

In terms of visitors and popularity comparison shopping engines stand far above all other types of vertical search. This could be attributed to numerous factors like the marketing of the services, competition in their field, etc.

When it comes to advertising budgets spent on vertical search ads - there are no publicly available statistics. From what is visible as running banner and text ads on those engines one can make the conclusion that this is still an undeveloped area. My hopes as developer and owner of one of the listed engines - Izgodnobg.com is that this is about to change.

A comScore study involving all countries with more than 10 million internet users revealed that social networks reached 87% of Canadians and 85% of Brazilians during September 2008 (9.3 points increase when compare to last year), taking the second place from UK.

According to the same study, Orkut is still and by far the leading network in Brazil, with 21 million unique users last September, five times more than the second one.

Google is allowing advertising on Orkut again: text ads as part of the content network and banners on profile pages (CPM model).

Lesley Richards - Samia Kesseiri of Web Certain

• Reach your marketKeyword researchSegmentation and geotargeting
• Decide on your budget
• Localize your objectives
• Media Placement
• Landing page localization (landing page relevancy - unique sale propositions …)
• Track it !
• Campaign performance analysis
• Test it !

What not to do …

• Political factors
• Don’t assume everyone purchases online
• Algerians research online and buy offline
• In China payments are mostly Cash on delivery, not with a credit card
• Geotargeting is essential in big countries (see Brasil for example)
• CPC can vary considerably - don’t expect to pay less in India than in the UK
• English is used in B2B - don’t think you need to go local always …
• Don’t “translate” your website, localise
• Local Search Engine & media placement don’t think global, go local
• Don’t underestimate brand awareness that generic terms can offer

• Usability - a website can be used to achieve specific goals.Often people have the perception a website works because Clients say “they like it” or “I think it works fine”
• Often there are problems related to effectiveness - can users achieve what they need to ?
• Ease of learning
• Recognition rather than recall
• Error prevention & Satisfaction all fundamental parameters requiring attention and measurement to benchmark website performance.
• Search Usability - ease with which users find information on a website.
• People say a lot about what they want with their keywords - more “pogo sticking” there is less likely are conversions …
• Balance between business goals and users goals - that’s web usability.
• Only when you talk to users you can identify their motivations
• Human-centered design - personas, make believe people, a tool to get the people on the web page.
• Persona must be specific, name and visual image, hypothetical, unique for each project
• Prototypes for different sites (in different languages) look very different in different languages - layouts can change significantly.
• Users have one of 3 intentions: navigational, transactional, informational
• Realistic expectations about Search engine positioning is fundamental - don’t design for search engines, but for people who use search engines.
• For navigational searches the URL is very important - home pages and the about pages are of this type
• For informational queries, URLs are not so important, rather the Title and descriptions
• A powerful Search marketing campaign cannot forget the user - need to know why people are searching
• How + Why = long term ROI

• Market in Scandinavia is now exploding, growing by 20%.
• offer PPC on maps (nordics like maps very much)
• As search expands it becomes “less Googlish”
• Local search scene - Scandinavia is the 6th market place, Google, MSN, YAHOO! is very small
• Enrio is a top search within all Scandinavian countries.
• Local PPC offerings 4 Search Media networks Google YAHOO! MSN Enrio/MivaBlended SearchVideo, news images, directories, are used to enrich user experience third generation , search 3.0 in local environment.
• Blending is blurring for search marketers as it adds more complexity - Google is using Eniro for local results,
• Eniro is using search results from Google to complement the local directory.
• Local services: High quality search traffic transparent network true partnership innovative solutions service = people locally you’ll get more value for money …

• Driving digital customer engagement - Microsoft has made many recent acquisitions, platforms and brands for people to use.
• Display and Search: more effective together - running display and search together has a much greater impact (x7), more time spent and greater number of secure pages visited.
• Presents Engagement mapping - they are creating an engagement modeling to measure the entire true value of a campaign.
• Microsoft Live Search Expansion of search40% unanswered queries50% queries require refinement high cost and commitment
• Live Search has an approx. 4.5% share UK YAHOO! 4.8% and Google 75.3%
• Algorithm and Index are important and have priority, now using multimap as mapping software
• Research Investment - Blind Taste Test, a comparison between Live.com and other search engines to test validity of the results
• Search behaviours: 3 categories Find, Discover, Explore - these are highly engaged in their exploring, the most interesting group
• Farecast - currently all around travel.A way to get the best price for travel or hotel (US innovation)
• Cashback - the provider will give you a cashback in your cashback account - you gather money in your account
• New search technology centre - european specific with new innovations that will be lead also in Europe, not only the US, trying to be more country specific.
• Most activity has been concentrated on making the search product better before any further branding of the live search product.
• It’s harder to bring back users that have had a bad experience.
• New tools for the adCenter have ben released - adcenter desktop tool now available, this was the N. 1 request of users - designed around office 2007, now in beta available to premium clients, now the excel plugin - allows to do research on keywords an keyoword suggestions.
• adExcellence is the Online Educational Tutorial website to learn all about adCenter (www.adExcellence.com) there is also an adCenter Community (adcentercommunity.com)

Yandex is THE leading search engine in Russia.

The presentation will be on contextual advertising in russia , Yandex is number 1 portal.

The Russian Internet audience.there are particularities - Russinas are:

• Reluctant to read English - Russians
• Do no trust online communications, they call and do not trust online banks -
• More than half sales are paid in cash on delivery !
• All the metrics about secured pages are pretty much useless in this market
• 33% of russians are weekly users about 19 million users - big growth potential.
• There are mainly DSL connections
• Younger people (12-17) are most active with a peak in Moscow - typical of Russia,
• Moscow is like a separate country.
• Leading Search Eninges Russia:

• • Yandex
  • Google.com
  • Mail.ru
  • Rambler.ru

(liveinternet.ru stats)

• Google has taken traffic from rambler.ru
• mail.ru is in the business of mail hosting (mail portal using Yandex as search technology)
• The share is stable, the audience is growing
• Internet Advertising Market in Russia.
• Figures from 2007 are presented - display ads and contextual, display ads look like they will go down with the crisis, contextual will probably stay stable.Contextual Advertising (October 2008)

• Yandex 60%
• Google 32%
• Begun 9%

Search traffic is the best traffic, slightly better in quality.

Bidding: On Yandex it’s in units (1 unit = 30 Rub, aprox 1 USD)

Begun - in RubelsMinimum order: Yandex 300 Rub. with monthly budget above 21.000 Rub you get a personal manager (english speaking)

Begun 140 rubModeration: be prepared to produce certificates to advertise alcohol tobacco medicine, etc.

Yandex - do not accept irrelevant keywords

Begun is “tolerant” in moderation

Yandex has “authorized agencies” they are marked as “reliable” - they are careful on the service provided not so much the turn over. they are relatively reliable.

Yandex Direct Now:more than 50.000 advertisers monthly more than 1.200.000 active ads monthlymore than 3.500.000 active keywords in ads monthly

• More than 40% of Yandex reach is in Moscow, then St. Petersburg,
• Other russian areas 30%
• Other countries 12%
• Average price for click: high tech $ 0,31Consulting $ 0,62 Tourism $ 0,34 B2B $ 0,66 (going down along with finance, and education)
• Yandex offers an English interface but not the best it could be presenting russian where English is not available.
• Yandex offers premium and guaranteed positions - the most intensive way of promoting your site on Yandex search, followed by rotation.
• Premium position gives 5 time more traffic.
• In Begun you bid for positions.
• Yandex presents an automatic words refining tool (maximizes CTR by adding stop words: if your ads are not triggering clicks they will automatically add some negative keywords that will reduce your add exposition)

1st up is Stephanie Kidder - Pinnacle Systems with her presentation, Managing successful international paid search campaigns.

An interesting overview on how to manage a multilingual PPC campaign (they have a multilingual website and work in 6 languages).

They work a great deal with rest of world outside US hence multilingual aspects are very important.

Working with a specialised agency, an integrated approach is ideal - avoid translation as localisation.

Alex Burmaster - Nielsen Online, European Search Landscape

• Nielsen Online, what consumers do and consume online, what they say and share online
• Italy 20% increase in the number of people using search engines, uk +6% Spain +12%
• People are spending more time in search online +26% Uk + 10% Italy
• In Sept. 13% of click throughs are paid , 9% (D), 7% (F)
• 28% CTRs are travel, multi category commerce, 27% home and fashion 25% (this is UK, similar in Germany, a bit on the lower side in France 19%-17%-17%)
• drilling down Insurance, gifts 6 Flowers, multi-category, loans, free merchandise, credit card, multi-category level, cruise lines, hotels, automotive
• Secure click throughs: 4.2%(UK) 2.6% (F) 2.1% (D) - a search link will ultimately lead to a secure website
• Google, Google Images, MSN/WL, ASK, YAHOO!, AOL, Virgilio Ricerca, Viola, Trovit, Google Product are the main engines, in this order
• Mobile search becoming an increasingly important aspect of search, Italy in head of Europe, UK, F, D, ES - italy a 2.2 million unique mobile internet users
• Mobile search is a male orientated landscape - roughly 70/30 in Europe, but tends to be closer to a 50/50 split in the UK
• Age group 35-49 is the biggest group (always for mobile)

“In 2008, China’s net-using population has surpassed the US to become the world’s biggest, with 253 million people according to the latest report.’ Robin Li, CEO of Baidu said: “This has brought SEM with greater development opportunities, so I believe that more and more Chinese enterprises will set up departments within the next 5 years to learn and promote SEM.”

Currently, Japanese characters can be used as “郵便局.jp”. There are about 1 million “.jp” domains registered and about 140,000 of them use Japanese characters.

In October, Google had already announced that Google Sites - a tool for creating free sites online - was also available in the Portuguese language.

Accoona launched in 2004 with great fanfare including having former US President Bill Clinton speak at its opening. Accoona claims to list 49,728,000 company profiles on the search engine. In China Accoona has supplied search results to Sina.com and Sohu. Accoona also has an exclusive partnership with the China Daily News, the most widely-read daily newspaper in China.

“We have worked intensely for the last two weeks in order to get all of the legalities and finances in place for the takeover and there is still a great deal of work in front of us to integrate and re-launch the search service,” states Rasmus Refer, founder of the Masterseek Corp.

The study also revealed that Japan recorded the highest penetration of users of Apple iTunes software during the month, when compared with US, UK, France and Germany. 25% of Japanese Internet users accessed iTunes in August.

Yahoo! Music led the category with 7.3 million visitors, followed by Sony Connect with nearly 3 million visitors and Sony BMG Music Entertainment with 2.7 million visitors.

Youa will compete with current C2C marketplace leader Alibaba’s Taobao.com which owns 57% of the marketshare. Alibaba recently announced that it will invest RMB5 billion (US$732 million) over the next five years to further strengthen the Taobao marketplace. Taobao has 80 million registered users and over 1 million sellers. Other C2C marketplaces include Paipai.com, and Eachnet.com. According to Piper Jaffray Youa will make up about 3-5% of Baidu’s estimated revenues in CY09.