The library houses an important collection of books in the French language and some rare editions from authors such as Nostradamus and Newton. Not all of the books in the collection are in the French language as the Italian, Latin, English, German and Spanish languages also feature prominently. It is the second largest collection in France after the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

Other libraries in Europe which are also involved in the project include Lausanne in Switzerland, and Ghent in Belgium.

For what it’s worth, Lyon is also a beautiful city - speaking as a former resident!

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.

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!

Construction begins in the Summer and will take until 2008 and the site will use the nearby canal for water cooling of the computer hardware. The site also benefits from access to a fibre optic network and the total invesment will exceed 250 million Euros.

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!

The legal action is the most recent example of the news media’s challenging the growing power of internet news portals run by the large search engines. Increasingly, people are obtaining their news in bite-size nuggets on search engines, and advertising revenue for newspapers is diminishing as a result.

Copiepresse, an organisation that helps enforce the copyrights of some of Belgium’s best-known newspapers, including Le Soir and Le Libre Belgique, sued Google for publishing summaries of articles in the newspapers along with a link to the web sites of the newspapers.

In the meantime, there are no results of the newspapers any more in Google. Sweet revenge?

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!

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….?

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.

Belgium is right at the heart of Europe. With a mix of French and Dutch speakers they border the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg and France. There are no barriers to ownership of the .be domain; registrants can be from any country. If you are new to multilingual marketing, this offer represents a unique opportunity to experiment. It is possible to target Belgium, the Netherlands and France using the .be suffix - so it can be a very effective route to market. The offer is limited to 10 domains per person and will end on the 31st of January 2006.

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.

European businesses abuzz over ‘.eu’ domain names - INQ7.net