Why does this matter in search? Nokia is an $80 billion turnover company which makes its money from selling handsets - but it is now rolling out internet services which include maps, music and TV services - no mention of search - see this report from Cellular News. Telenor is an $18 billion turnover company. This partnership represents a considerable investment by both companies in internet access which they will control. Could well be the opportunity for a different search engine - funded by the telecoms companies - to make headway?

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!

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!

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.

Although that capital is relatively high, we don’t expect any extensive business activity because they likely do not have their own office as the address of the company same as their auditor’s (BDO Kontroll).

Google.hu currently has 15-20% of the search market — but as of now, it is powered by Kurzor.hu of Hírek Média. So it’s possible that the new Google company will get the domain and such a change may shake the whole Hungarian search market.

While I have no more official information about this business movement, this is clearly part of the developments in Google’s European Adwords Strategy.”

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

Norway and Portugal have been the fastest growers in the last with 19% and 15% respectively. Five eastern European countries score for the first time - Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Ukraine and Slovakia. Top scorers are Finland, Germany and Poland.

XiTi - Etude Xiti Monitor

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.

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