Multilingual search

Multilingual Search moves and seeks new contributors

2005-08-15T20:46:00.000+01:00

Multilingual Search has moved house - to www.multilingual-search.com.

Explains managing editor, Andy Atkins-Krüger, "We've received a great deal of encouragement from readers who say we're providing a useful service. Now we've made Multilingual Search easier to use for marketers who are researching particular projects. It's now possible to view only posts from the country in which you're interested."

And we're looking for new contributors to extend our reach right around the globe!

Do give us your feedback and comments - they're much appreciated.

Yahoo! Invests $1 Billion in China's Alibaba

2005-08-15T17:57:00.000+01:00

Seems the battleground between the major search engines has shifted to China. Following Google's interest in Baidu - that recently went public and whose stock is performing well - Yahoo has announced a billion dollar investment in Alibaba - a Chinese ecommerce site.

The billion dollar's gets Yahoo! a 40% stake in the company.

A recent MarketWatch article gives a good overview of the recent increase in activity of search engine and tech stock in the Asian continent.

AOL targeting Latino Market

2005-08-03T17:37:00.000+01:00

Seems AOL is joining the popular push to attract more Latin traffic. They have announced a new TV and radio campaign whose goal is to draw more Latinos to AOL.

The Spanish speaking market seems to very popular right now.

Google Buys Brazilian Tech Company

2005-07-22T03:53:00.000+01:00

Google annouced it purchased Akwan Information Technologies, a Brazilian search company. Google plans on establishing a Research and Development division there and to use it as a base to spearhead their Latin American efforts.

IP tv

2005-07-20T20:55:00.000+01:00

Telecom Italia and Tiscali announced the launch of IP tv starting at a T.B.D. date some time between September and November of this year.

Telecom Italia is now broadcasting Video On Demand via Rosso Alice 4 Mbit ADSL which they are planning to use for the newly announced IP tv service. The service will initially be available in 21 cities reaching an estimated 4 million families.

Source: Corriere della Sera

Google China Hire Starts MSN Lawsuit

2005-07-19T21:33:00.000+01:00

Seems a new hire at Google, formerly of Microsoft, has created a stir and has been served with a lawsuit by MSN.

ZDNet reports that Kai-Fu Lee is being sued by Microsoft for "the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working" and was now disregarding.

Canada May Outlaw Google

2005-07-14T16:46:00.000+01:00

Interesting article about the impact of new laws in Canada. Search engines in Canada will have to be very aware of copyright laws, though the international nature of the web may make it hard to enforce.

The only possibility is that the engines create different submitting procedures for the .ca version of the business.

Chinese search engine - Baidu - to float its shares

2005-07-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

Baidu is reportedly about to float increasing the speculation about Google's position in China. Baidu is the leading Chinese search engine - and one which Google bought a 4% stake in during 2004.

It is known that Google CEO - Eric Schmidt - flew to China last week and there are rumours that Google will attempt to buy Baidu as Google's own site does not have the leading position the company's become accustomed to!

Google facing search engine China quandary - Yahoo! News

Yahoo makes first moves on Poland

2005-07-11T09:33:00.000+01:00

Yahoo is heading towards a Polish launch - at least that's the conclusion of the Warsaw Business Journal which reports that Yahoo has launched Polish-language email accounts with 1 GB capacity.

Currently, the Yahoo domain for Poland - pl.yahoo.com redirects to Yahoo's UK site.

Yahoo currently operates native-language portals in Europe as shown by the map on their world.yahoo.com portal - but despite having a Russian language portal - Yahoo has little eastern European presence. In fact, they include the Russian language site as part of their presence in the US - targeting Russian speakers in north America.

Source - Warsaw Business Journal Online

China Joins Spam Fight

2005-07-07T17:16:00.000+01:00

An article at internetnews.com, annouced that China is joining the internation battle against SPAM.
China, the article notes, is the leading nation for zombie computers - infected computers that are used to send Spam. They have joined the 29 nation (and 17 private sector groups) task force to combat Spam.

Mozbot: New French Search Engine

2005-07-06T02:20:00.000+01:00

Gary Price over at Search Engine Watch pointed this new engine out today. The engine is still in beta, and is getting its listings through a partnership with Google.

The add-ons seem to be the interesting elements that could make them popular. They have a personal "blacklist", a link to the archive.org (The WayBack Machine), Whois information, dictionary definitions and other additional features.

According the article Mozbot is looking to expand to the UK and US.

Information on Broadband Access in Italy

2005-06-29T18:45:00.000+01:00

"Osservatorio Banda Larga" provides updated information on broadband access in Italy. The web site requires registration and provides up to date studies and articles from qualified journals and newspapers.

New Spanish search engine about to appear?

2005-06-29T18:05:00.000+01:00

Could the Spanish 'Paginas Amarillas' (Spanish Yellow Pages) be about to launch a new Spanish search engine?

Lucía Bartolomé contacted 'Multilingual Search' regarding having spotted a site at www.noxtrum.com under development. Currently only indexing is taking place.

Lucia says "The owner of the search engine is TPI (Telefónica Publicidad e Información), which is the owner of the spanish Yellow pages (www.paginasamarillas.es). They intend to link the information on the SERP with the information in the Yellow Pages, and basic inclusion in the search engine would cost 32€. They don't specify whether it's a monthly fee or whatever. "

TPI haven't officially informed us of any developments - we'll investigate and update this story as it develops.

Hong Kong to Enact SPAM laws

2005-06-27T22:51:00.000+01:00

The Direct Marketing News ran an interesting story that the Telecommunications Authority was getting ready to enact SPAM laws.

Italian ICTLex wins Freedom blog awards 2005

2005-06-23T20:14:00.000+01:00

The European section of Reporters sans frontières has chosen the Italian blog www.ictlex.net as one of the most active Blogs defending freedom of speech. Ictlex.net was identified as the best blog in Europe, and one of the top 60 blogs worldwide.

Source: Corriere della Sera

Seekport nominates Elena Bonini Head of Index

2005-06-23T15:16:00.000+01:00

Seekport Tecnologie, the new pan European Search Engine has nominated Elena Bovini Head of Index for Italian activities launched this past Tuesday.
Elena is responsible for the quality of results provided by seekport.it and is based in Milano. She will coordinate the editorial staff and oversee all search and indexing activities in Italy.

Register.it launches pre-registration procedure for .eu TLDs

2005-06-23T09:20:00.000+01:00

Milano, June 23rd 2005 – Register.it leader on the Italian market of web site hosting, online visibility and part of the DADA Group has been officially authorised by EURid to accept preliminary registration of .EU TLDs as of today

Register.it is currently accepting pre registration of .EU TLDs free of charge at

http://we.register.it/domains/eu/

The offer is valid until August 31st 2005

Fight over Misspelled "Googl" Domain In Australia

2005-06-22T05:03:00.000+01:00

The Australian courts may determine who has the rights to misspelled versions of trademarked domain names. Accoording this story from ZNet a local Australian businessman bought the domain but the registrar decided to take it back as in their opinion it was an obvious misspelling of Google.
The businessman is now suing for the return of the domain and the decision of who has rights to misspellings in Australia will go to the courts.

Seekport expands it’s reach to the Italian community

2005-06-21T14:03:00.000+01:00

Seekport, the innovative European search engine which is already active in Germany, France, UK and Spain, expands it’s reach to the Italian community and launches seekport.it

Joachim Kreibich has answered our questions in a brief interview in connection with the launch of Seekport Italy:

1. Would you like to introduce Seekport - who is Seekport ? Where is Seekport based ? Is there going to be an office in Italy ?
Seekport is a pan-European search engine that provides an alternative to the US-based search engines that are dominating the market. We engage both in B2B as well as B2C activity. B2B means that we deliver search results to portals, publishers, ISPs, marketers etc. which incorporate our search functionalities in their online offerings. B2C is aimed at the end user - persons that want a high quality, country-specific offering with less spam and more relevant local content than what the US companies offer. Also, it is noteworthy that we are the only search company that already can offer vertical search - our users can choose if they want to search only in a certain thematic topic, and then only receive results from this category.
We are based in Germany, in Hamburg and Munich. Actually, the history of Seekport is closely connected to Infoseek - the persons involved are the same that made Infoseek to the most successful search engine in Germany in the beginning of the new century.

We have local index teams in all countries that we operate in, that ensure that the quality of the index is up to our standards and that the search results reflect the demands of the local country. Our teams are - next to Germany - in Paris, London, Madrid and now in Milano. At the end of the year, we will be present in 9 countries in Europe.

In Italy, we will start with a beta version, which will already incorporate the preview functionality. Other functionalities we offer will be introduced a little bit later, and we will also work heavily on the index in the beta phase. All users are welcomed to send us comments and suggestions.

2. Which is going to be the focus of Seekport - are your objectives a particular segment of the search market ?

See also above. We offer both general search as well as vertical search. Also, and very interesting for our B2B clients, we offer site and archive search, and this can be combined with the web searches, so that a B2B customer can display site or archive and web results on one page.

In general, we want to give our customers the best search experience possible. For example, in Germany we already offer various suggestions to make a search query more specific, so that the user really gets the search results he is actually looking for

3. Give us an overview of the main features of your search Engine

General country-specific or Europe-wide web search. Vertical (theme-oriented) web search. Example. A user is looking for virus. Now, this can be both virus as in computer virus, or health virus. If our user however chooses "Health" as his topic, he will only be displayed search results which deal with viruses such as HIV, hepatitis virus etc..

We will also offer clusters, query refinements etc. For our B2B clients, also the above-mentioned site and archive search are relevant.

4. The Seekport interface is geared towards country specific results. In Italy we have many English only web sites with a .it suffix - could you explain how you have organised country specific queries versus regional web sites ? Will for example .co.uk web site acquire a better visibility than .it ones if the user runs a search selecting the pages from a specific European country ?

In general, we aim to have search results that are very country-specific. Regarding your example: We know that the great majority of users searches in its own language, and prefers to have results that are in his language. This no longer is a problem, as there are now - at least in Europe - more than sufficient web pages to all topics in the local language. If a user wants to have more results, he can choose to search in all indices.

Now, if an Italian user looks for information in English and does not restrict his search to Italy, an Italian page will not be given a higher weight than a UK one. The results will be displayed by relevancy.

5. I have noticed that you are providing a free service called seekbot where you provide an analysis of a web site page - The results show that on page content is very important, even more important than the title tag - would you like to further elaborate the importance of on site factors compared to off site factors such as external links ??

I am sure that you will understand that we will not elaborate on our ranking algorithm. Many factors influence the positioning. But most certainly, the factors described in seekbot are important. Seekbot is a tool for the normal webmaster that might not know too much about what is important for placement in search engines in general, and might not be aware of what he should do as a minimum.

6. Spamdexing is a very serious issue all search engines are closely looking at to remove poor quality web sites - where does Seekport stand on this issue ?

We very much disapprove of spamdexing, and try to keep our index as free of spam as possible. This is why we have quality teams; these teams - among other tasks - try to keep up with what spam is present in the local countries, and take on countermeasures. Of course technology plays an important part in this.

7. You have introduced a very interesting preview window function that allows the user to view the web site before actually clicking on the link that would take him/her to the web site: Would you like to elaborate on this original implementation on SERPs ??

We think all features that help users evaluate if a search result might be relevant for him are useful. As mentioned above, we have various functionalities that follow this goal, and there will be more to come

8. What is Seekpot’s view on local search and geotargeting ?

Very important, and we are working on it

9. Will Seekport have a Directory ?

No, this is not planned. I would like to stress that our vertical search offering is not based on a directory, but on an innovative technology that analyses the web pages that are crawled and then assigns a "theme"/topic automatically. This is an advanced technology, which we have registered for a patent

10. Can you give us any insight on your plans regarding Pay per Inclusion or Pay Per Click programs ?

We will of course have a pay per click program on our site (after all, we need to make money), but not in the very beginning. Pay per inclusion is not planned.

Scary Non-Privacy Issues in Europe

2005-06-16T05:19:00.000+01:00

CNet reports in this article that though the European Union government failed to adopt Privacy legislation, requiring ISPs to record all electronic communication, it seems the individual countries have decided to implement the laws.

As the article mentions "U.K. communication service providers already retain data on customers' phone calls, e-mails and Web behaviour for one year, thanks to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act."

.EU Registrar Accreditation

2005-06-14T17:19:00.000+01:00

Starting 11.00 (CET) on 16 June 2005, the European Registry of Internet Domains we will begin to accredit .eu registrars

Web Agencies liable for trademark infringements on .it Domain Names

2005-06-14T13:55:00.000+01:00

A recent ruling of an Italian court has caused turmoil in the online industry. A maintainer was tried and found guilty of setting up a domain name on behalf of a customer, who was infringing trademark laws of a well-known enterprise operating in Italy.

In the online search industry the domain name may become a relevant part of the search strategy: keyword-rich domain names have been known to be favoured by search engines, giving them the ever-so-slight advantage on competition. It is not uncommon to seek a local presence by setting up a new local domain to acquire visibility.

The procedure to set up an .it domain name involves 3 parties:

The Italian Registration Authority (NIC.it)
A Provider/Maintainer
The end user

A maintainer is typically a web agency or internet provider who deals directly with NIC.it. The end user is required to undersign a formal request of activation (called la lettera di assunzione responsabilità). The maintainer is required to follow a technical procedure to finalise registration.

The provider/maintainer, formally considered neutral in the process, is now held responsible and accountable for damages caused to others should infringements on registered trademarks be raised by a 3rd party.

The court identified providers/maintainers as an active party in setting up a domain name. By registering a domain name that relates to a registered trademark, the sentence identified the actions of the provider/maintainer similar to those of a “counterfeiter”.

The judge defined domain name purchasing as a typical entrepreneurial activity where risk is involved: Providers/Maintainers requesting the activation of a domain name, possibly a registered trademark, are being warned: You are liable for trademark infringements in Italy.

China's Sohu Commits to Emphasize Search

2005-06-14T01:36:00.000+01:00

Sohu seems to have adopted the Avis moto, "We try harder." And, taking the global Google out of the mix, like the Avis, Sohu is China's number two search engine.

The Chinese government has tightened restrictions on internet companies, and search engines and portals in particular. With a ban on two of the largest income producing search areas; adult content and gambling, Chinese search companies need to reach out to other industries.

The interesting aspect of this is the non-capitalist Chinese may have to embrace their antithesis.

Country-specific Links in Google Rise in Global SERPs

2005-06-12T18:37:00.000+01:00

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch forums discusses the improving positions of country-specific domains in the Google SERPs.

Whether this is a change in the algorithm or just that more international webmasters are developing increased links in the international community has yet to be determined. But the most insightful post discusses the fact that local inbound links have a big impact for results in that locality. If you are looking to improve your site for a specific country get links from that country - even non-topic specific links (though this I am going to test before taking it as a fact).

A Video a Day keeps Digital Divide Away

2005-06-10T13:48:00.000+01:00

Starting June 13th TgBlog will broadcast daily a 30" video on the Internet for those wanting to use it but don't know where to start.

TgBlog focus is information and useful tips on how to make the web part of everyday life to find a job, travel, listen to music and find useful information.