Multilingual Search - global search marketing news » Spain

Forrester Research, Inc. data on mobile instant messaging (IM) in Europe

Sante J. Achille — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:16:50 +0000

A recent study from Forrester Research, Inc. indicates mobile instant messaging (IM) on the rise in Europe with 26.7 million users in 2007 and a projected 80 million users in 2013.

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

Europe, France, Germany, IM, Italy, mobile instant messaging, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK, United Kingdom

24 European states go borderless under Schengen

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:54:49 +0000

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.

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Global Search Report 2007 - free PDF download released

Nick Wilsdon — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:20:07 +0000

The Global Search Report is an annual compilation of search engine usage and PPC statistics from countries around the world. The aim of the report is to raise the profile of markets outside the usual well reported US/UK sphere and should provide essential information to those interested in multilingual marketing.

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)

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EURid suspends 10,000 .EU names squatted in China

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:14:09 +0000

The .EU domain registrar management organisation, EURid has suspended 10,000 EU domain names which have been apparently legally registered by a Chinese woman - reports out-law. EURid has the power to remove the domain names from the woman - but has said that it would prefer a court to do it.

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!

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Google webmaster tools starts to think international

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:20:03 +0000

At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

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!

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European travel market to hit 25% of transactions online

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:52:22 +0000

A report by PhoCusWright Inc says that the European market on average will hit 25% of transactions carried out online during 2007 - this figure was achieved in the US in 2004.

There are, however some key differences in European markets:-

UK and German buying patterns are most similar to the US
France is behind the average thanks to low outbound travel and fewer low cost carriers
Spain and Italy are further behind thanks to lower broadband access and less internet use (and let’s face it if you live you don’t need to travel so much do you!!)

Via www.hotelexecutive.com

Google to Acquire Spanish owned and started Panoramio

Marina Zaliznyak — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:08:06 +0000

The fact that I’ve been silent for some time, doesn’t mean that the Spanish internet isn’t churning up stories. In fact, there are quiet a few. I’ll start with the latest and for many one of the most impressive. If anything, it’s a good sign for Spain and will have plenty of local internet entrepreneurs on their toes. During Google’s Developer Day 2007 held on May 31st, a local acquisition was announced in Madrid. Google has agreed to acquire Panoramio, a small, but certainly very ambitious and successful Alicante based company.

The official announcements can be found in Google’s Blog as well as Panoramio’s. The Spanish blogosphere is buzzing with the news. Panoramio is based on Google Earth. The gist of it’s utility and it’s main attraction is that Panaromio allows users to associate photos with locations. This way, users help create and share a have a photographic atlas of the world. Panoramio has been working closely with Google Earth for over a year, integrating Panoramio as a layer into Google Earth. A very logical and visually exciting extension of Google Earth, which has in turn helped Panoramio grow their database. The acquisition is also timely with the integration of Streetside views.

According to Eduardo Manchon of Panoramio, “The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence. We have tightened our relationship with Google Earth more and more in recent months, and at the end we decided to walk one step further. After so much work together, honestly, we couldn’t imagine a better scenario than selling Panoramio to Google.”

As far as I know the the amount that Panoramio was acquired for has not been disclosed by neither of the two parties. Whatever the amount is, the acquisition is certainly motivational for hundreds of other Spanish start-ups—Google doesn’t have a blind spot for Spain.

There’s an official Q&A posted by Google. Take a look. Better yet, experiment with Panoramio.

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Ya.com reveals their own video and photo sharing services—YaTV and YaShoot

Marina Zaliznyak — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:40:40 +0000

Spain’s leading online portal and telecom, Ya.com has launched YaTV and YaShoot in order to compete with YouTube on a local level, here in Spain. Both of the Web 2.0 services use Ya.com’s proprietary tagging service, Etikedo, to help organize photos and videos on YaTV and YaShoot. Etikedo consolidates photos, videos and links, where users can tag their favorites. Much like hundreds of other similar services available all over the world.

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Google’s Isabel Aguilera confirms the rumor: Google is working on a mobile phone

Marina Zaliznyak — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:17:41 +0000

A number of Spanish online sources are reporting on a recent rumor, now confirmed by Isabel Aguilera,Google’s Managing Director in Spain and Portugal—Google is working on their own mobile phone. Google Phone? gPhone? Confirmed, right here in Spain.

The news seemed to catch everyone off guard. Was that something that was really supposed to surface?
Certainly it’s not a surprise. Nowadays Google seems to be working on everything and with all of the solutions currently available, a phone that consolidates all of the features (Gmail, Google Maps, mobile advertising, etc.) seems like the next logical step. However, the Spanish blogosphere has it’s doubts as to whether the newsflash was entirely unintentional. Up until now, Google’s headquarters have been unwilling to comment on the rumor. Now, the cat’s out of the bag.

In either case, on the 14th this month, in a conference organized by the Association for the Progress of the Mediterranean Region (Asociación para el Progreso de la Dirección de la Zona Mediterránea), Alguilera confirmed that the company’s engineers are dedicating part of their time towards building a mobile phone for better “access to information.” This is one of the 18 projects that are cooking in the Google labs.

Sources:
Noticias.com
Libertad Digital

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European telecoms operators threaten US search hegemony

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:51:32 +0000

The UK’sTelegraph online reports that 12 of Europe’s largest telecoms operators - with one American firm - are planning to launch a mobile phone search engine to rival Google and Yahoo.

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!

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‘We’re all helping to create the Google monster,’ Exalead CEO, SES Paris

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:09:14 +0000

The Google monster came under concerted attack from Francois Bourdoncle, CEO and founder of France-based search engine Exalead in the opening keynote of Search Engine Strategies Paris. The press in particular should be worried about becoming sub-contractors of Google, he said. Whilst at present Google News brings plenty of traffic to sites under the brand names of the press outlets, this would change to Google’s brand in the future. Portals - by which Mr. Bourdoucle is referring to all the major search engines - are the “Walmart of the digital world,” he added.

In a considered talk which revolved around the concept that search is not that effective and there is plenty of room for other search engines despite Google’s dominance, Mr. Bourdoncle explained that an IFOP Omnibus study had shown that 75% of searchers actually have problems finding ’stuff’. 22% think there are too many results and 45% never bother to look at the second page.

Much of search, he explained, now revolved around Yellow Pages-style search where the user knows that a particular keyword produces the set of results they are looking for - even though apparently it is a free text search - the reality is now very different.

The 30 ‘verticals’ which Google now has cannot be presented in the results. Searcher intent is problematic because searchers don’t always know what they want. This was the reason Exalead is focusing on ’search by serendipity’ whereby the user has the option to ‘zoom out’ as well as ‘zoom in’ and to discover things they didn’t even know they were looking for.

He also criticised the new sitemaps collaboration announced by Google, Yahoo and MSN at Pubcon in Las Vegas. He said, “The sitemaps specification is not nice and open and it is not nice and closed”. He believes the initiative aims to close the door to new entrants to the market place.

Exalead aims to profit from the Quaero research initiative by bringing new technologies to the search engine which, he revealed, now has a new infrastructure in place which it has taken 8 years to build. “We have moved extremely slowly but now we’re going to move extremely quickly” he stressed. Exalead, which has offices in France, Spain, Italy and Germany is to be re-launched under a new consumer-facing brand soon.

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Blogs influence European consumers

Sante J. Achille — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:40:54 +0000

A recent Jupiter Research, released a report on the European Online Advertising Forecast, 2006 to 2011.

The executive summary presented by emarketer provides an insight on the European online expenditure future trends. Europeans are buying more online.

Predictions by Internet Retailer see online advertising expenditure rise to an 8.3% of all European advertising spending.

Forrester Research reports that online sales are showing significant increases in Italy and Spain, respectively 31% and 27%.

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Europe leads in mobile internet access

Sante J. Achille — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:03:25 +0000

eMarketer reports on Internet access via mobile devices.

The study was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and the US. while 29% of European Internet users regularly access the Internet from their mobile phones, only 19% of US users were accessing the web via their mobile devices.

The highest mobile Web penetration was in Germany, Italy and the UK (at 34% each), followed by France and Spain, and the US.

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Spanish web: Speak up! Spanish content is lagging, or so we´re told

Marina Zaliznyak — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 18:30:08 +0000

Spanish is the third top spoken language in the World, yet a recent Accenture study found that the fact is no indication of it´s performance online.

Lets look at the numbers

Internet growth in Latin America and Spain just last year was 337% and 375% respectively, yet Internet penetration is still below the European average (38% in Spain and 49% in Europe).

But it´s not only the Internet penetration that´s the problem. The ratio of websites in Spanish per user, is far lower than the ratio for English (1.47), French (1.25) and German (1.23). Spanish´s ratio is less than half of German´s, at .58. So it seems in this case, it´s not really the Internet penetration that´s the problem. Somehow the Spanish Internet just doesn´t produce the same amount of content.

Why? And does this make any sense?

Reading an entirely different report, The 13th NetObserver Report by Novartis (pdf), it appers that Spain leads, the UK, Germany and France in the use of new communications Technologies, including podcasts, instant messaging, email and BLOGS.

But that´s just Spain. What about Latin America and the U.S. hispanic population, clearly and important piece of the pie? AOL´s Latino 2006 Hispanic Study found that: “81% of Hispanics online are mostly acculturated or partially acculturated, while only 19% is relatively unacculturated. While acculturated online Hispanics tend to prefer online content in English, nearly 40% of them still find Spanish content appealing; of the unacculturated segment 37% prefer both languages. Of the total Hispanic online population, only 15% prefer Spanish only.” These numbers correspond to 16 million hispanic users online. If 80% of these users prefer content mostly in English, mustn´t they also prefer to produce content in English as well?

Still, a ratio of .58 for the Spanish language seems much too low. It´s difficult to have an objective opinion, while living and working in Spain and swimming in Spanish content. Are the numbers skewed? And if not, what´s the weakness?

Leave your impressions.

Sources:

Netimperative
El País
Hispanic Business

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New Emarketer report on European online commerce

Sante J. Achille — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 14:37:30 +0000

Emarketer reports Ecommerce trends for the next few years, associating robust growth in online sales to the increase of DSL lines installed both at home and at work.

The report identifies the UK as the most “mature” of all European markets, outspending european and even american counterparts on an annual per capita basis.

The study shows Spain and France as the fastest growing internet user populations, while Germany and Italy lead in broadband uptake.

The article identifies other markets such as Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway having active online consumers, forecasting Poland and other Eastern European as “serious online retail marketplaces in their own right”.

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Popular Web 2.0 Applications in Spain

Sante J. Achille — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:25:14 +0000

Read/Write Web rolls out another report on popular web 2.0 applications for the spanish market.

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Acoona launches European version of its search engine

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:48:14 +0000

Accoona has launched its search engine into the European zone - in fact western Europe. The search engine - which is on a .eu at www.accoona.eu searches by language - rather than country. Currently, the EU version runs in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

Following the search you have the option to refine your search by geography, person, company, language or publisher.

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Europe studies the Web 2.0 phenomenon with TAGora

Sante J. Achille — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:52:57 +0000

TAGora is a Research Project funded by the European Union. The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction and social networks.

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.

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Introducing Migoa; Interview with CEO, Gary Stewart

Marina Zaliznyak — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:31:30 +0000

Only a few days ago, another search engine was born in Spain. Migoa, a newborn multilingual search engine, currently in beta phase, aims to take away the hassle of broad search results, by scouting through countless results to deliver highly relevant, specific results for job, home and car rental.

Multilingual Search is happy to be the first to welcome Migoa into the highly competitive, but extremely rewarding world of search. To introduce you to Migoa, I have interviewed Gary Stewart, Migoa’s CEO.

1. Who is behind migoa?
We are a racially diverse, international group of entrepreneurs who want to live in Barcelona but participate in international projects. We came together, because we thought that we had diverse but complementary CVs. I am an African-American from New York City. I received my undergraduate degree from Yale College, my law degree from Yale Law School and I currently own my own business in Barcelona. Oriol Blasco is a Catalan who earned his undergraduate engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona (UPC) and his MBA from ESADE Business School. We are also currently engaged in talks with potential investors/partners who would bring in a high level of IT expertise.

2. What is the idea behind migoa? What is migoa set out to do?
The idea behind migoa is simple: the Internet is now so big that current search engines cannot fully satisfy the wants and needs of all possible users across the world. When you type in the words “comprar piso Barcelona” (buy apartment Barcelona) in major “horizontal” search engines, you get 7.6 million results, most of which are frankly irrelevant. Who has time to weed through that many results and filter through literally millions of irrelevant listings that have been optimized for top rankings? A vertical search engine allows the user to find what she wants when she wants it in a very user-friendly and highly personalized format. The major horizontal search engines are incredible at helping users find general information. We aim to supplement this with a product that ensures that users can find specific products—such as jobs, cars and homes—with as few clicks and as little hassle as possible, all while taking into account local and linguistic realities.

3. Why Spain? What is your take on the Spanish market for these types of projects and the internet arena as a whole? How does migoa fit in?
Europe is more challenging than the United States in terms of being an entrepreneur, raising capital and running an Internet company. People here are interested in tech projects, but they are more risk averse and thus not as willing to give seed capital, at least when compared to Silicon Valley or even London. Bootstrapping is obligatory. That being said, some Spanish investors are following with interest and caution what is happening in the US—the so-called, web 2.0 phenomenon. And as both computer and broadband access prices fall in Europe, the Internet is becoming an ever-present reality and people are increasingly interested in fully experiencing what the Internet can offer. migoa is a web 2.0 project, and we hope to be at the vanguard of the Spanish equivalent of the international phenomenon.

4. What does “migoa” really stand for?
At the beginning, it was a play on the initials of our initial partners. The island of Goa also had fond memories for some of our partners. However, we like to think of it as an anagram of “amigo.”

5. What type of audience will migoa cater to? Who should come to migoa.com and why?
Our audience is generally young (18-45) and tech-savvy. It is made up of people who aren’t afraid of user-friendly technological innovations and/or are experiencing some of adult life’s defining moments—building a career, buying a car and searching for a home.

6. A little bit about the technology behind the solution. How does migoa work? What are its features?
Our robot, or “bot” for short, crawls other websites to find the relevant information and compile it in a standard format. We have also reached agreements with important players in the Spanish market to send us their listings via feeds. In any case, we don’t search the entire web for information. We have pre-screened the websites on which our bots will search to include only sites that contain the desired information. The user searches for the product that she seeks—a car, a home or job—and we generate brief descriptions of actual listings (and not irrelevant references to pages on which the useful product might be found–again, that’s a key difference between a horizontal search engine and a vertical one). Like all search engines, when the user clicks on her desired listing, she is redirected to the website that originally published the information.

7. For how long do you envision the beta phase?
We have already launched a private beta to identify and correct major bugs that we might have missed in our internal testing. In late September, we will launch a public beta version and we expect to be in public beta for the short-to-mid term future. We are also developing a lot of new features that will be integrated within the 3-4 months, and each new feature will also require a lot of beta testing.

8. It looks like you are shooting for a multilingual interface. When will all versions be fully functional? How many total languages are you aiming for?
That’s right. We live in the European Union, which has countries with such rich and diverse heritages and strong linguistic traditions. We want to celebrate all of those histories and traditions, and to allow for interchange between and among countries whose citizens have increased possibilities of intra-EU mobility. We will start out with four languages—Spanish, English, French and German—but we expect that the number of languages to grow.

9. What’s in store in the future? Ambitions? Advertising model(s)?
Our goal is simple: to build a useful website that will be bookmarked and visited whenever users are searching for jobs, cars, and real estate. We want to be a reference point in the European and Latin American search markets. To that end, we will continue to add new features, learn from our mistakes and continue improving our product.

10. What does Migoa compare to, both in Spain and elsewhere? In other words, who do you envision as your immediate competition?
We prefer not to discuss our competitors, as most of them have not launched, have launched only within the past few months, or will launch very shortly. Any discussion of what they do or how they might evolve would be premature. We have had the good fortune to be in the vanguard of people launching a highly innovative product. That being said, we know that there are a lot of very smart people involved in competing projects and luck is an important factor in whether you ultimately have a successful product.

11. Tell us something we forgot to ask.
We would like to invite all tech bloggers to help us test the beta. Send me an email. gary at migoa.com or skype me: garystew.

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