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)

The company already owns US affiliate portal LinkShare which should help them in their efforts.

Interestingly, Rakuten president Hiroshi Mikitani said one of the reasons for expansion was due to the shrinking Japanese market. He expects the number of online shoppers in Japan to begin decreasing due to the country’s low fertility rate, he told the Kyodo News.

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

Ask.com Italia was officially launched in beta on March 8 and opened a European Research Centre in Pisa that will play a significant role in the development of Ask.com search technology.

Source: Mauro Lupi’s Blog

Read more about Search Engine Strategies on Multilingual Search

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

A few months ago, when it all began, this Spanish grown initiative was creating a buzz in the Spanish internet and traditional press. But as the commotion around FON has been escalating and users and access points mushrooming all over the global map, the FON idea is growing into the slogan its founders have given it—the FON movement! The FON movement has spreading into a Global community.

Just 2 days ago, Varsavsky made a huge announcement on his blog. The FON movement has enlisted some very big names and swept up 18 million euro (over 21,560,000 USD) in investment from Google and Skype, as well as Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures as investors and backers. Varsavsky, energized for another success, writes about the impressive newly acquired support:

“Our goal, after all, isn’t just to share bandwidth. It’s to use the power of people to people networks to create a global wireless network. What makes each of these firms great backers for us is that deep in their DNA is the idea of brand-new business models, tons of innovation and a commitment to making the digital world easier and cheaper. We feel the same way. So while we’re excited about (and responsible for!) their investment, we’re even more pleased to have their support.”

The question is of course, what will the ISPs have to say about it. So far, Varsavsky has confirmed support from the U.S. Speakeasy and Swedish Glocalnet.
But how many others will follow?

According to Roger Entner of Ovum, FON will run into obstacles. “That’s a great idea, but you are breaking the law…It is treating Wi-Fi as communal property when it is not.”

Lately we have been breathing an entirely new internet atmosphere. Internet usage is shifting; internet access increasing. It seems the perfect breeding ground for a FON… revolution.

Are you joining?

Sources:

LibertadDigital
El País
The FON blog
News.com

You’ll also have the chance to become a Yahoo! Ninja. Yahoo ask people to vote on answers. You need only submit 10 best answers a day for the next three months. Ask something profound and brag to all your friends.

Yahoo Answers

This table, which takes into account both English and Spanish speaking Hispanic users, demonstrates how #1, #2, #3, #4, and #7 are our dearly beloved SEARCH ENGINES! Oh YES! Hispanics love search! Here is the data to prove its impact. There are no other web properties that get higher visits than these. Search is an important tool for all people online (including Hispanics) to accomplish their daily needs. Whether it?s for shopping, research or knowing what?s new in entertainment, news, or a favorite recipe. The recipe for success is search for them. Then again, websites like eBay (#5), Amazon (#8) and Cnet (#10) could have received in large proportion of their traffic via a search results as they are highly optimized.

One more thing that grasps my attention, is the reach among each of these web properties. From these percentages seems to me that both Yahoo! and AOL have been doing a great job focusing on the Hispanic market. Most likely this is due to their Yahoo! en Español and AOL Latino advertising campaigns. Their marketing push has brought great rewards. Microsoft is not doing that bad. On the other hand, Google and Ask Jeeves must keep these numbers in mind and keep thinking of strategies to gain market share reach against its rivals. Google already taking action from its recent deal to power Univison.com search results into the world wide web. However, “Donde esta el Mayordomo Jeeves?”.

How can we (the search engine marketers) do for website owners to help accomplish growth in this market segment? There is so much content, especially Spanish content, that needs to be optimized so that search engines can understand it via their algorithms and point users in the most relevant direction. At the same time, I feel there is so much education still needed for search engine marketers to do it right.

Keep these things in mind and hope to see all of you in SES Latino 2006 , which is a new event in the Search Engine Strategies line up. As you know, Hispanics and Latin America rank among the top worldwide Internet users and they are the fastest growing region in the world. For more information, please visit the website.

Brazilian Portuguese
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Korean
Russian
Simplified Chinese
Spanish
Traditional Chinese

Sitemap submisssion is not limited by the language of the site, as always.

Source: Inside Google Sitemaps

To a major extent they are right, even links from bad neighborhoods won’t harm you. The logic of course is that if this was the case it would be open season on all your competitors site.
However, with enough links from local language sites you can blow a site of the water!

We found this out accidentally. The background is as follows.
Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the top level domain name - ‘ .de’ for instance, the meta language tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of the text.

Normally you’d think one of these factors could not override the rest. However, inbound links can override all other factors into duping Google that the page is of a different language than it actually is. This has disastrous consequences, for example if a German page focusing on German language readers gets a highly disproportionate amount of links from english language sites. Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the top level domain is ‘.de’, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english - which results in dropping a lot in google.de but rising in Google.com.

You know this is a problem when you see on a Google.de search the words “Diese Seite Übersetzen” which translated means “translate this page”. This normally corresponds with a fall in Google.de but a big rise in Google.com as Google does boost local sites of the language. I know this is a problem as it has happened to ourselves. http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/foren/ is a German language forum but was classed as english as I built too many links to it from non-english sites to it (easier for me as I am english). We quickly changed that and now things are back to normal. For a few days, a lot of traffic was lost. It also happened to a client before we knew about the existence of the problem.

The examples above were due to too many links from english sites, however, an English site with a too large ratio of say German links is likely to end up drastically losing rankings and having “translate this page” in the Google results.

If you come across an english language page with “translate this page” in the google reults and it fails to rank well then it will most likely mean you have too many links from foreign websites. This can happen through link purchase or through one of the many link networks for example.

Fortunately we have managed to get our rankings for our own forum and clients back. It took a while to figure the problem out though so I thought I’d share it here. Clearly this can also be abused by knocking the competition ou,t so imo Google should really not just take inbound links as an overiding factor of language.

Alan
ABAKUS Internet Marketing

• France has a higher percentage of 20 to 29 year olds with qualifications in science or technology than the UK or US.
• Start-ups qualify for an 8-year income tax holiday!
• France is the third-largest recipient of foreign aid and the fourth largest exporter.
  10 of the world’s 100 largest companies are based in France.

France grapples with its image problem - silicon.com

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.