The survey was conducted on a sample of 22.000 consumers in:

• France
• Germany
• Holland
• Italy
• Spain
• Sweden
• UK

Three years after the launch of IM mobile operators appear less than enthusiastic about this technology, fearing cannibalization of profits deriving from text messaging services (SMS), however the growth of IM is seen as “inevitable”

Niek van Veen, analyst di Forrester Research identifies IM as a means to differentiate mobile operators services and improve user experience.

All this will have a significant impact on web and search technology as mobile devices become an integral part of work and leisure.

Source: Spot and Web - N.15

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.

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!

Norway’s Schibsted is already using the technology on its Sesam search engine - see ‘cheap flights’. The displayed ads follow a similar style to Google - but are not as limited in terms of how much text they show.

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!

A nice Christmas present for the Google team!

Sometimes used
Google 96% (+1)
Ilse 20% (-2)
Live.nl 8% (-5)
Yahoo! 8% (+3)
Lycos 4% (=0)

Mostley used
Google 90% (-1)
Ilse 4% (-1)
Live.nl 1% (-1)
Yahoo! 0% (=0)
Lycos 0% (=0)

The results presented have raised some questions, however the trend is there for all to see.

Read/Write Web provides information on users behaviour and top web 2.0 applications for the following countries:

• Germany
• Korea
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Russia
• UK

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.

Accoona is a new european search engine with interactive tools that provides web, business and news results. It is powered by proprietary Artificial Intelligence technology.

The Accoona Corporation was founded in February 2004 and is a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence (AI) search technology.

Accoona offers search capabilities in:

• German
• English
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Dutch
• Portuguese

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!

The top 10 of the best scoring Dutch websites:

1. Wehkamp (92,2%)
2. De Telegraaf (81,4%)
3. RTL (76%)
4. Orange (75,2%)
5. Jamba (75,2%)
6. De Volkskrant (74,8%)
7. Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat (74%)
8. Ministerie van Defensie (73,5%)
9. Etos (71,5%)
10. Albert Heijn (71,5%)

The Results
The media, telecom and retail branch dominate the top 10 but also the government does well with two entries. No less than 68 of the 100 companies achieved a findability score of less than 50%. On the basis of these results can be concluded that a large part of the sites tested in this study are insufficiently designed (optimized) for search engines. Developing and applying an effective Search Engine Marketing strategy for a company could generate more qualitative visitors for these websites and as a result also increase sales.

Media budget has no effect on findability
The amount of media budget proves not to affect the findability of websites for search engines. It is not automatically the case that companies which have a large media budget are better findable by search engines than companies which have a smaller media budget.
The branch in which an organization is operating tends to be a better predictor of the findability. Branches that are directly commercially dependable on the internet often have higher scores than ‘offline’ branches. It is remarkable to see that the branches ‘Travel’ and ‘Retail’, which achieve large online sales, have disappointing results in the Findability Top 100.

Criteria findability
In this study we have examined the following criteria: sitemap, title, meta tag description, meta tag keywords, frames, headers, amount of content, Flash, number of indexed pages, Page Rank and link popularity. The criteria applied in the study have been selected from hundreds of variables which can influence the findability of a website by search engines. This study gives a reliable indication of the findability by search engines.

Research set-up
The websites of the 100 largest advertisers (source: Nielsen Media Research) have been analyzed using 11 of the most important findability criteria. For every organization and every branch we have examined four pages of every website, including the homepage, which were selected on important user motives. These pages have been analyzed on their findability for search engines. The results of the individual organizations based on the 11 findability criteria have been arranged from high to low and compared with the size of the media budget. This list eventually resulted in the Findability Top 100.

• The complete Findability Top 100 can be found on the Checkit website: http://www.checkit.nl/study_top100_online_findability.html
• This press report can be found on line:
  http://www.checkit.nl/press-reportenglish_findability_top_100.html
• Editors are allowed to use these texts and images only under the condition of mentioning this text:
  Checkit http://www.checkit.nl

This study was conducted by Ralph Ruyters, master-student business communication & Digital Media at Tilburg University.

About Checkit
Checkit B.V. is a Search Engine Mediabureau which makes and keeps organizations findable on the internet. Checkit offers the top 500-organisations in the Netherlands a complete package of services with which they can optimize their findability on the internet. Checkit is specialist and market leader in the Netherlands in the field of Search Engine Marketing. For more information about Checkit, visit our website: http://www.checkit.nl

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has released a report illustrating the rapid growth of internet use globally. Much of this growth can be put down to more women and over 50’s coming online across Western Europe.

The report also contains some interesting figures on internet growth across a range of countries, including Russia, China and India, comparing data from 2004 and 2005.

Usage has risen across the board with 35% (rise of 16%) for Russia and for India 21%(rise of 15%).

The Netherlands has the most mature market, with 84% of its inhabitants going online. They are followed by Canada (79%), UK (76%), US (76%)and Germany (67%).

In terms of access Netherlands again came out on top (72%) with established western markets close behind. Access has risen though for Poland (20%, up 18%), China (33%, up 14%), Russia (15%, up 8%) and India (14%, up 11%).

Russian users are still overwhelmingly young people. Only 3% of Russians aged from 50 to 65 have access to the Internet. To compare, in the USA and Canada 68% from this age group use the Internet, in the UK this index is equal to 67%, in Germany – 53%, in France – 52% and in Poland – 22%.

Source: RataNews | Pew Global Attitudes Project