The debut of Search Engine Strategies Italy was certainly a successful one. Although I cannot report on the number of participants, it was apparent and for all to see that the number of people attending various sessions was very encouraging …

Faster internet connection speeds look like they’re going to arrive in Saudi Arabia - according to Arab News - and this is to be achieved through electrical wall sockets. This method is expected to take the Saudi broadband speeds …

Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist

Because we want to provide everyone with access to all the world’s information, including information written in every language, one of the exciting projects at Google Research is machine translation. Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars.
Several research systems, including ours, take a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages

In our never-ending quest to help you waste your day in better and richer ways, we’ve added support for video feeds that have Flash players. Mainly, this means you can watch videos from Google Video or YouTube directly in Reader. Here’s a few feeds that work well:Popular videos (Google Video)Top rated (YouTube)Recommended Picks (Google Video)”Jump”-ing videos via search (Google Video)Recently featured (YouTube)Most discussed this week (YouTube

Only a few days ago, several Spanish media players such as Cinco Dias, Baquia and El Pais Published articles about a new social search engine called Gennio. Not only does the engine sport an innovative line of services, but it …

Posted by Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager

Automated testing is one of my passions: it has hard problems to be solved, and they get harder every day. Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work on several automation projects, and now I’m getting a chance to combine my passion for automation with my love for the city of London.
I’m happy to announce that Google will be hosting a Conference on Test Automation in our London office on September 7 and 8, 2006

Remeber how Google bought Sketchup last month? They’ve now announced that they will be giving it away for personal use. So go ahead download it, and start modeling your world- a house, toolshed, cabin, who knows what else. I’m not sure what the practical uses are at the moment, but it sure looks like a lot of fun.

It has all sorts of 3D geometry and pre-made components so you don’t have to do the grunt work, and cool things like automatic, real-time shading shows you just how the sun will hit your project. If you want to see some samples of what people have modelled with this software, check out the Sketchup Warehouse- you can even upload your own model when you’re done. I’ve posted buildings but you can use this to model anything.

I know this post is somewhat a rambling confusion :), but I just wanted to add that in the 3D warehouse, you can download the model right to the Sketchup software or to Google earth and view the sattelite imagery for it. This is getting cooler and cooler.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, “Microsoft Israel’s R&D centers will play an important role in our global R&D strategy. Moshe Lichtman’s (the new R&D center manager and former IPTV devision vice president in Microsoft) vision and vast experience of product development and management makes him the ideal candidate for the task of driving forward our R&D efforts in Israel and furthering our cooperation with Israel’s high-tech industry and venture capital sector.”

This piece of information might be slightly outdated, but it is nonetheless worth mentioning. On September 16th, I wrote about ICANN’s approval of the .cat top level domain (TLD). It was certainly a big deal. The decision to open way …

Search Engine Strategies has opened for business today in Milano, the first SES conference to be held in Italy. The turn up has been significant considering the event being a first time. 20 sessions ranging from organic positioning to pay …

Israel biggest web players and the popularity of search

Threadwatch carries the news that Seekport are partnering with an Arabic company to create a new Arabic language search engine:

“There is no (full) Arabic Internet search engine on the market. You find so-called search engines, but …

Since we received positive feedback about the new AdSense for content and AdSense for search code generation wizards, we’ve created a referrals code wizard to help guide you through the process of implementing referral buttons on your site. Simply choose Referrals from the AdSense Setup page of your account and select the product of your choice.And don’t forget, now you can display referral buttons in a text link format as well.

Threadwatch and ThomasB report that Google has extended the GoogleMaps application to cover many more countries in Europe. Then have even followed route E30 all the way to Moscow!

As Thomas writes, the implications for local search are significant. With multilingual …

Nigma.ru, the Russian search engine run and supported by Moscow State University, has announced a partnership with Softmart.ru, a leading hardware provider in the country. The main result of this deal is the provision of 100 new high performance …

There’s good news for those of you who are partial to Square (250 x 250) and Large Rectangle (336 x 280) ad formats: Now they support image ads! This means that if you’ve opted to display image ads, the pool of ads competing to show on your site is about to expand — and with more ads available, your revenue potential will also grow. Check today to make sure you’re opted into image ads.

SEMPO Japan has announced the results of Japanese SEM market research at the SES Tokyo on April 20.

The results show that more than 60% responded that they use SEM as a mean to improve the brand recognition, and more than …

One of Japan’s oldest search sites, goo, has added “encyclopedia search” button on its dictionary search service, “goo dictionary”. This is the first tie-up search service with Wikipedia in Japan.

goo dictioary has about 3 million users/month, and one of …

Last weekend saw the launch of the first Internet and Business conference to be held in Russia. It was a prestigious event and most of the companies and individuals shaping the new Runet were in appearance. With the current surge …

Paul Gigot of Fox News interviewed James McGregor, former Wall Street Journal China Bureau Chief and the author of “One Billion Customers: Lessons of from the Frontlines of doing Business in China.” McGregor will be a keynote speaker at …

Yandex, the Russian mega-portal, have released a new auto-focus tool for their PPC system, Yandex Direct. This will give marketers the ability to let the system select similar keyword terms for their adverts.

As you might expect the auto-focus is …

Seems Google has come along and grabbed this Aussie’s algorithm. According to an SEOChat article, Google acquired the algorithm developed by a New South Wales University graduate student.

The Orion search engine hunts down pages where the content covers a topic …

A recent survey reported by SPOT & WEB Media Communications Magazine shows an increase in search engine usage as a key element to identify products, independent of their value, prior to purchasing on line or off line.

Search Engine Watch reports that Google is to open a research and development centre in Russia, run by Sergei Burkov, Founder & CEO of Dulance

Google plans to use Russia’s phenomenal engineering talent to help develop great new products both for …

Multilingual Search doesn’t normally report on news from search marketing agencies - but the news that Danish search marketing firm Notabene is to float on the Danish stock exchange is somewhat close to home: Rasmus Sørensen of Multilingual Search is …

Google bought Writely several weeks ago, in an attempt to challenge Microsoft’s domination of the Word processing market. Ajaxwrite a new Javascript powered online word processor brought to us by Ajaxlaunch, is now offering some pretty stiff competition. AjaxWrite is platform independant, the only requirement is a Firefox browser, and you can access, create and save Word documents from any computer. AjaxWrite doesn’t offer all the options that MS Word offers, but admittedly, Word has so many obscure functions, that instead of enhancing your productivity, it can hamper it. I personally hate the “personalized” menus. I’m way faster if I can always count on a menu option being in the exact same place. For that matter, I prefer keyboard commands. For me they are a lot faster. Anyways, to get back to the subject at hand, I tried out AjaxWrite and it worked pretty good for me. It had all the basic functionality that I need in a word processor, and I saved the document to my HHD without a hitch. Will I use it everyday? Probably not right now (OpenOffice is working fine for me), but if I’m ever on a box that doesn’t have a word processor, I can always fire up FireFox, and create my Word document. I give it a full thumbs up.

Nigma.ru have released a press release today to mark their 1st birthday, which was officially on 12th April. The Nigma.ru metasearch engine was developed as a project by the students and graduate students at the psychology faculty of Moscow State …

I stumbled on a new creation of Spurl Ltd, an Iceland-based search engine company. The URL is www.zniff.com and it obviously is still in a testing phase. They claim that you search the entire Web or 8 million Icelandic …

In a move that was praised by the People’s Daily, eleven news websites backed a call for self-censorship and the eradication of pornographic and violent content on the internet . Fourteen portals in China also announced earlier that they …

Baidu, China’s leading search engine, and Intel signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to cooperate in the development of Internet search and related applications in China. The two companies will work together to develop search applications for personal computers, …

The recent allegations of registry mismanagement by Bob Parson have been partially dismissed by EURid spokesman Patrik Lindén as reported by Punto Informatico earlier today. Mr Lindén reportedly stated that manipulations may have occured due to the presence of …

Bigmir.net, the Ukrainian internet statistics site in partnership with Sputnik Media has released their metrics report for March 2006.

During March, the Ukrainian internet audience grew 10% (274′000 new users). Bigmir.net estimates that there are nearly 3 million (2,913,193) internet users …

Iceland (pop 300.000) is the most web-savvy country - a recent study shows it has the highest concentration of broadband users. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that broadband was also widespread in South Korea, …

Is there is a minimum number of impressions or clicks I need to get before I can start earning through AdSense?No, there’s no minimum number of impressions or clicks for generating earnings. You can start earning the very first time a user clicks on a cost-per-click (CPC) ad or views a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) ad. Keep in mind, however, that you’ll need to earn $100 before your earnings will be paid out to you.If a CPM ad appears on my

The shopping focused search site, Become.com, has opened its Japanese beta version “Become.co.jp” on the 10th.
The site users can search the information such as products, reviews, and EC site comparisons in Japanese.

On 12th, Google announced the release of new “Google mini” in Lego-ish simple design, the search appliance for mid to small companies.
Google picked Japan as the first market for the new “Google mini”, and this version is 100% localized …

According to Datamonitor, Convera is adding multilingual search capabilities to their technology.

Essentially they are using Paris-based Temis’s XeLDA engine into Convera’s Excalibur platform, an indexing and categorization technology. This will include support to the following languages:

French
German
Spanish
Russian

Integrating both technologies makes …

Latest figures from Hitwise gives Google 74.8% of all UK internet searches in March. The top four search engines were responsible for 95.7% of all UK internet searches in the period.

Specifically Hitwise says:

MSN.co.uk and MSN.com combined …

A quick reminder to all of you working in the Chinese Market, MarketingSherpa has released the second part of their free two part report on the subject (part 1 covered here) It focuses on mobile marketing, search marketing, and Internet …

The number of broadband subscriptions throughout the OECD continued to increase in 2005 on the rise from 136 million in June 2005 to 158 million by the end of the same year.

Broadband rate of growth during the same period …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt defended Google’s cooperation with the Chinese government’s censorship while announcing their new Chinese name in Beijing Wednesday. Scmidt told reporters “The number one goal, by far, is to serve the Chinese citizen who wants information” …