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 biggest competitors to Fast Search on search solutions for large cooperations is Googles Search Appliance, French Exalead as well as Autonomy.

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.

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!

September
Webanalytics wednesday Stockholm 11-Sep
http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/wednesday/

Webbdagarna Malmö 12-Sep
Webbdagarna Göteborg 26-Sep
http://www.webbdagarna.se

Svedma Stockholm 27-Sep
http://www.swedma.se

October

Webbdagarna Stockholm 24/25th Oct
http://www.webbdagarna.se

Emetrics Stockholm 29th/30th Oct
http://www.emetrics.org/2007/stockholm/

SMX Stockholm 31st Oct/1st Nov
http://searchmarketingexpo.com/smx_stockholm07/

November

SIME Stockholm 14th/15th Nov
http://www.sime.nu/media/

IMC Stockholm 29th/30th Nov
http://www.internetmarketingconference.com/stockholm2007/

The group managed to attract 120 people to the event where 4 search engines, Eniro, Yahoo, Microsoft and Sesam had 15 min each to talk about their view on the market. As people in Sweden isn’t famous for having tons of questions in hand, they listened well and the response that was passed on to the members of the SEMPO Scandinavia group later was very positive about the new initiative and activity in the market.

SEMPO Scandinavia is now planning to do similar events in all of the Scandinavian markets and key focus is to update the market and drive search marketing in the overall marketing mix and create debates and more interaction.

SEMPO Scandinavian group is launching its official presence through a first (of many to come) breakfast event the 12th of June in Stockholm where the search engines; MSN, Yahoo!, Sesam and Eniro will meet up with marketing managers and present their view on search marketing in the media perspective and then open up for a debate with the audience. Google wont be joining in this time as they have a new marketing manager and as you all know… Johan Kinnander left a few weeks ago.

(The event is free but there are limited seats so everyone who attends needs to RSVP.)

To read more about the group or request to join SEMPO or the working group go to:
http://www.sempo.org/public_groups/scandinavia/

As it happends I also happend to be the chair of the group

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.

“There’s no question that search technology and performance advertising have dramatically transformed the world of publishing, but for many publishers the transformation has not paid off as well as it should,” said John M. Lervik, CEO of FAST. “Publishers want to maintain control of their revenue, serving their advertisers and audiences more effectively, and this has been difficult to do with third-party platforms. With FAST AdMomentum, we give that control and independence back to publishers – enabling them for the first time to fully monetize their assets without having to share revenues or risk customer disintermediation.”

Definitely, this new product will compete with Google AdSense & Yahoo Publisher Network since there is no more revenue sharing with this new platform, the publisher can sell his own listings directly to advertisers and spread the ad through his local and/or national network.

FAST will launch this new platform in first quarter of this year; also they did beta testing with one of their clients such as: 24.com, local.com, sesam.no, and sensis.com.au.





Fast’s press release announcement

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 new design is cleaner and leaner and supposedly will give better Norwegian search results. Furthermore they are planning a huge media campaign throughout the year worth an estimated 2 million €.

Get a sneak peak at the new design here

See the new net search function results here

See the new company search results here