It is not uncommon to see Bulgarian words written with Latin letters when examining referral logs or when using keyword tools. This type of searching seems to be most common among teenagers, but it is not limited to just them. The actual percentage of such queries is probably unknown even to Google, since there are so many words that can be transliterated. Some words become valid English words when transliterated and others have more than one (non-standard) transliteration versions in use which further complicates the task of spotting such words.

Not before long, when a searcher entered a query, containing transliterated words, he or she would get too little results and would definitely miss a lot of great websites. This resulted in a poor search overall experience.

However, Google has taken steps in alleviating the situation and now returns much more relevant results where it failed before. It is using the official standard for Bulgarian-to-Latin transliteration as approved by the Bulgarian Government so it catches most cases. In cases Google is not sure about whether or not this is a transliterated word it gives the “Did you mean…” message, suggesting the right transliteration, like here. Nice job, Google!

Website owners, webmasters and SEOs need not worry any more about people who are trying to reach their websites with searches with Latin transliteration versions of the keywords.

* This is a problem not specific to Bulgaria, though. As far as I know the problem with Non-English speaking users entering sometimes queries with a transliteration of the keywords in Latin letters is present in China, Greece, Japan, Russia and other Slavic language countries. I have no information about whether or not this problem is solved in these countries but I hope my fellow Multilingual-Search editors will help

So far so good - mighty Google turns its eye on Bulgaria and tries to promote its Adwords advertising platform. Invitations were sent out to a number of selected people (selected on basis of… ?) and these were given a link to www.googleuniversity.eu. The page says to register for the event as fast as possible since the number of attendees is limited and registration is done on a first-come, first-served basis.

One of the selected people, who also happens to be a well-respected blogger among the SEO and internet marketers crowd here, published the invitation he received on his blog. He also had commented about the legitimity of the event because the invitation doesn’t fit in what one expects from Google.

The language is not the style you are used to seeing from Google, the domain is registered on behalf of some unknown Polish company and the contact info on the page itself leads to that same Polish firm. Quite a few people suspected this was a scam, including me. Actually I remember saying that if it turned out not to be a scam I would be very suprised. And I meant it.

Nevertheless, even under the suspicion that this is just an email harvesting scam or an unscrupulous advertising company trying to use Google to attract attention, a couple of hundred people could not resist taking part in the event (if real) and enthusiastically signed up for it. News about the event quickly spread around the blogosphere and the various social bookmarking sites.

About 24 hours later they all received an answer from the Google Adwords team saying “We regret to inform you, but your registration have been rejected because this event is invitation only”. These letters caused quite a lot of disappointment among these who registered and had been rejected. There were even some people who initially got their invitations confirmed and THEN CANCELLED!

What happened is - Google never disclosed to those invited that the invitation they received is personal and that information about the event should not be distributed. They also failed to implement a say, unique code solution so that only people who received a correct code could register.

This does not end here though. Letters were sent and phone calls were made to some bloggers and even to a blog aggregator service, demanding that information about the event registration is to be pulled down. As you can imagine, this resulted in even more reaction demanding official apologies from Google and better handling of the situation they created.

A few people, including me, wrote to Constantina Stoyanova from Google EU Headquaters as she is responsible for Google Adwords in Bulgaria. No answers have been received so far. Having a one-way communication is definitely not good in this case.

I do not know how you’d call it, but for me leaving some of your biggest supporters and fans, current and future clients and evangelists of your services so disappointed is quite a disaster and deserves more attention than what we have seen so far.

Multilingual-Search.com will keep you informed of developments.

It is expected that online spending will account for 5-10 % of the total advertisment spending, compared to around 3% currently.

Telecommunication companies remain the biggest online advertisers. They are followed by companies from the financial sector - mainly banks. Technology companies like HP have also increased their online spendings and are starting to abandon traditional media in favor internet advertising. The automotive industry has also increased its online advertising budgets, but we are yet to see a company from this sector among the top advertisers.

Visitors to Diri.bg are presented with a very clean interface - just search box and tabs with vertical search suggestions. The verticals are as follows: News, Images, Video, Music, Products, Blogs, Forums, Wiki, Jobs, Law, Real Estate, Auto, Mobile Phones, Cinema. At first glance they seem quite nice, but as it turns out, searching in Images, Music, Law, Products, Forums will only return results from corresponding section of Dir.bg. The other tabs include like 4-5 sites in which the search is actually conducted. The vertical searches have too poor diversification and are also a lot Dir.bg oriented.

Next thing you notice right away is the Wiki tab, which returns results from Wikipedia only. Diri.bg also employs a concept, similar to the “universal search” concept at Google: images, video, news and Wikipedia results, relevant to the search query are presented on the right side of the page, paralell to the main organic results.

Another thing to note is the “Helper”, which is a drop down box that drops as you type and shows you keywords that the engine thinks are related to what you are typing.

If you look at speed - it’s a bit slower than Google but still fast enough.

So far with the relatively good stuff. Aside from poor diversity in vertical search, the user expirience suffers hugely from the worst ordering and grouping of the results I’ve seen so far in a search engine. There is no apparent order in the results, you are in no way presented with the most relevant results first. Many queries were subject to testing with this in mind. The grouping of results is poorly implemented, so if you search for Titanik in the Cinema area you’ll get 11 pages of IMBD.com results (which are in English, thus not accesible for a lot of the potential users). The next 3 pages are filled with results from Dir.bg itself. You can also try “mp3″ in General search. It currently returns 3 pages with results from just one domain - mp3.bg. Searching for “blog” presents you with 100 pages from just one domain - Blog.bg.

Currently advanced search operators and options like the ones we are used to in Google, Yahoo, MSN are not supported at all. The engine does not use robots.txt or meta tags to forbid its SERPs from being indexed by other SEs which definitely raises some eyebrows.

On the webmaster communication side things are bellow zero. Absolutely no information is available for site owners / webmasters. Nothing about their web crawler. Nothing at all.

A quick comparison with Jabse:

>Jabse:

Populariy: Jabse had increased its traffic by 400% in the last year to 20 000 unique visits a day
Index Size: Has 5.5 million pages in index
Business model: All revenue is from contextual ads served by Easytrader.bg

Remains with strong position as far as quality of general search and image search results are conserned.

>Diri.bg:

Popularity: No traffic estimations yet, but it will have strong support from Dir.bg
Index Size: Claims 50 million pages in its index
Business model: Diri.bg has not presented a business model so far, so nobody has a clue about how will it support itself.

Looks better in some verticals, can look even better if it diversifies its sources. Could perform better general search if the ordering and grouping of the results are improved. Diri.bg has better perspectives for future development, given the resourses it can operate with.

Will Jabse or Diri.bg develop enough to become a factor in the Bulgarian Internet, despite the presense of Google is yet to be seen.

Before AdSense

Before AdSense came to the scene there were two PPC contextual networks in Bulgaria: Easytrader.bg and Neogen.bg. The first one is an entirely Bulgarian undertaking, started by three associates. It offers Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Lead and Pay-Per-Sale advertising platform on which advertisers and publishers connect. It currently has 850 websites and 50 active affiliate programs in it’s network and processes around 50 000 000 impressions per day.

Neogen.bg has a much smaller penetration, fewer advertisers and fewer partners - 170 only. It is a Romanian owned website offering a lot of different services.

Those systems were adopted by a number of small and medium websites but they failed to get to the larger websites who sold their advertising space through agencies.

Then came AdSense

With Google’s popularity behind and the adoption AdSense has in the English Internet AdSense for content was actually waited for by many webmasters in Bulgaria. They’ve all seen AdSense blocks on international websites and have heard about the nice income you can get from it. So, when a representative of the Bulgarian AdSense team made an announced the start of AdSense for content in Bulgarian on the most-popular Bulgarian webmaster forum there were reactions like, quote: “I’m going to the nearest bar to celebrate!”.

Critisism followed immediately about the ads not being targeted enough (quite a number of humorous situations were spotted), about the annoynment of the ads, etc. Nevertheless there was a quick and widespread adoption of AdSense for content. Many blogs and small websites quickly put the ad blocks on their pages. A bit suprisingly - many of the largest and most established websites turned to AdSense for part of their income, for example Dnevnik.bg, Investor.bg, Snimka.bg, Aha.bg, Elmaz.com, Vbox7.com, Ibox.bg, Sportni.bg, Netinfo.bg and others.

Additionally, many new projects were started, especially in the social bookmarking vertical which rely solely on AdSense revenue as of this moment.

This is happening despite the small number of advertisers involved so far and also despite the poor relevance of the ads. It appears that AdSense proves to be, so far, a real energizer for the Bulgarian internet.

- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalian
- Croatian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
and Tagalog can now use the personalized version of Google in their own language. With a total of 42 language versions iGoogle is accesible by 99% of Internet users in their native language.

Each report will also provide a snapshot of search engine usage and activity around the world, which can be compared against for the following year. This should help identify growth or decline for the search engines in each local market.

In the 2007 report we have covered the following 17 countries:

• Bulgaria - Georgi Georgiev (Investor BG PLC)
• China - David Temple (China Search Marketing Tour)
• Czech Republic | Slovakia - Katerina Rotterova (BenedaGroup.com)
• Denmark - Rasmus Sørensen (TLA Media)
• Estonia - Robin Gurney (Altex Marketing)
• Iceland - Kristjan Mar Hauksson (Nordic eMarketing)
• Israel - Gilad Sasson (Search Marketing)
• Italy - Sante Achille (Search Engine Consultant)
• Japan - Motoko Hunt (AJPR)
• Portugal - Nuno Hipólito (Search Marketing)
• Russia | Ukraine - Nick Wilsdon (e3internet)
• South Korea - Ebina Cho
• Spain - Oscar Carreras (WebCertain)
• The Netherlands - Peter Kersbergen (WebCertain)
• United Kingdom - Andy Atkins-Krüger (WebCertain)

The report can be downloaded free of charge by clicking the following link.

 Download Global Search Report 2007 21 Pages (1.3MB)

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!

Top advertisers are from the telecommunications industry - mobile and fixed-phone operators, followed by companies from the financial sector - mainly banks. Bulgarian online advertisting market volume now accounts for 4-5% of the Bulgarian advertising market and is expected to account for between 5 and 10 percent of the market in the following years.

These estimations, however, do not take into account direct deals between advertisers and website owners as well as most of the money spent on PPC, affiliate marketing, SEO and other areas of online promotion where agencies are not so strong.

The growth in the market is powered by the greater recognition of the media from business owners and advertising agencies as well as the ever increasing online population. Broadband internet penetration is quite high and provides new horizons for audio and video delivery.

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!

However, Jabse, a one-man project, has now 2500 unique visitors and over 8000 impressions a day. This may not seem as a big deal of traffic but given the internet penetration in Bulgaria these numbers mean that the project has some potenital.

Jabse is only indexing sites in Bulgarian and has an index of 3,150,992 pages - far more than the two true Bulgarian search engines before it. Its indexing algorithms are somewhat crude and the SERP building algorithms also need a lot of improvement in order to become truly relevant. Still it has some features that put it immediately ahead previous such projects:

- handling .PDF files
- handling .DOC files
- following
type links (links, embeded in images)
- it has access to websites that are visible only from Bulgaria
and it is said to handle specific language related issues better than other search engines.

Jabse image search is still a project, but the author said it is soon to enter development stage.

No monetarizing method has been used in the search engine so far and there are no official statements from the owner about the way Jabse will make money in the future.

My personal concern about this project comes from the unknown amount of traffic it recieves from Google right now. Pages from Jabse are allowed to be indexed by search engine robots, Google included. If the number of visitors coming from Google is high, then it is relying on its nearest competitor for traffic! On the other side, if the numbers are low then this project might really have a future!

Even though the research predicts over 33% Internet penetration in January 2007, things are not looking much better for people who seek to make money in the Bulgarian Internet in the short term. Bulgarian users use the net mainly to communicate with relatives, friends and business partners. ICQ, Skype, Yahoo Messenger and IRC chats are leading the chart of the most used online applications (in that order). The next in popularity among the online activites are downloading/streaming movies, music and playing online games.

Disappointing 2% of the population have been involved in online shopping once or more in the last three months. Online population in Bulgaria has more buying power than the average for the country, yet, it views Internet mainly as an enthertainment and communications channel and not as a way to make business or shop.

In spite of that, internet marketing is now considered an integral part of the marketing mix by most companies. On average, 3% of the marketing budgets are now directed to online advertising and promotion. The tendency is for that percent to grow.

An interesting indicator about the role of SEM in that mix is that among other tracked characteristics of business websites in the survey are “Google PageRank” (average PR of all websites included in the survey) and “Predicted Google PageRank” (again average). For those curious, the values are around 2.5 average PR for most groups of business websites. The number is not suprising, given the size of the Bulgarian web.

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.

The share of internet users in Bulgaria’s capital (Sofia) is 50% - twice as the average internet penetration in Bulgaria. A hole 32% say they use internet every day, while 10% access the web 2-3 times a week.

If we compare internet aduience in Sofia with internet aduience in the province it turns out that roughly 45% of Bulgarian internet population is located in the capital (Sofia’s population accounts for 18% of the population in Bulgaria). A main reason for this disequilibrium is that the price for internet access is on average 3 times higher in the province, than in Sofia.

This is a huge irregularity in internet usage distribution should be taken into account by online marketers in Bulgaria.

Other interesting highlight from the confernce was the announcment of top internet advertiser groups and individual advertisers by media value. Communications and finance sectors account for more than 60% of the advertising volume.

Top five internet advertisers for 2005 are:

• Bulgarian Telecom (telecommunications and intenet)
• NMSS (political party)
• Raiffeisen Bank (finance)
• Biohim Bank (finance)
• MobilTel (mobile communications)
• GIC (insurance company)

Still, in the beginning of 2006 Bulgarian online advertisting market volume accounts for only 2% of Bulgarian advertising market. There is a lot of space for expansion. One problem we observe is the lack of understanding of internet marketing from advertising agencies. They prefer to tell a client that internet is too expensive or without perspective rather than making the effort to enter the internet adverting space.

Predictions for 2010 show that Bulgarian online marketing spending to be around 50 million levs (approx. 31 million USD).

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.

“Fluency in English and Romanian is required. Bulgarian language skills are a plus. ” sounds like Google has decided to focus on Romania for now. With an online population of over 5 000 000 users (CIA’s World Factbook 2004) Romania indeed seems more attractive compared with the 1 800 000 internet users in Bulgaria.

Form the same page on Google’s website it is visible that the company is expanding its international activities in many directions. There is a strong focus on South America as the list includes Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Costa Rica, Peru and Puerto Rico. The Far East also gets a lot of attention from the giant in search. Regional representatives are to be hired in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Oceania.

The winners “Trans Telecom” and “Cable Net” will pay 5 million leva each (about 3.1 million USD) for the right to build A-class wireless networks in Bulgaria. There will be a second auction for the B-class networks in the following days.

Currently less than 1 percent of the internet population in Bulgaria prefers wireless. However there are reasons to believe in the expansion of wireless conectivity. There are some remote regions in Bulgaria where satelite or wireless is the only option both for business and home users and they will most certainly be the first to benefit from the expansion of wireless networks.

Sources:
www.investor.bg