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.

A recent Hotwire Ipsos MORI survey, identifies blogs as one mos the most influential information sources, second only to newspapers.

The study reveals that 34% declare they have not purchased a product after reading comments on the internet from customers or …

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 …

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 …

Abondance tells us that the Agence pour l’innovation industrielle (Industrial Innovation Agency) gave an update this week on progress with regard to 6 of its projects including the European search engine project ‘Quaero’. The project has a budget of …

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 …

French registrations of .EU domains show a clear rejection of the name by the French. After 24 hours, the French have only registered one fifth the number of domains (48,000) that the British have registered (260,000) - …

The BBC reports on the opening of the doors of EurID to allcomers trying to register one of the valuable .EU domains - now on a first come first served basis. Already 300,000 have used the sunrise period to …

Austria has fallen back in terms of home-based internet access reports Futurezone - although Austrian-based businesses still have access levels to match the top countries in the world. European statistics published on Thursday shows that Austria ranks only …

A fascinating cross-lingual scientific search engine called Dandelon.com - a collaborative project between the university libraries of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and AGI - information management consultants, together with GBV - has reached a landmark 100,000 books scanned and prepared …

The number of applications for .eu domain names seems to be somewhat tardy in the UK, according to the current figures from Eurid - where Germany - not surprisingly - is way in the lead with 81,000 applications, followed …

Ask Jeeves has finally launched in Germany with a German version.. Since it’s acquisition by IAC and the commitment of the company to expand multilingually and worldwide - this has been an expected and welcome move.

Multilingual Search announced the …

The long awaited .eu domain name opened today for applications. The ’sunrise’ period will run from 7th of December to 7th April 2006 to allow those with prior claim to secure their domains before they are made available on a …

Last week, on October 25th, Seekport, often referred to as the European search engine, made a European re-appearance in nearly all of its six locations (Austria, France, German, Italy, Spain and UK). Local press conferences and interviews were held to …

Mirago chose to launch its new advertising network in Sweden at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Stockholm where the first advertisers were formally signed up to advertise. Mirago is a UK-based pay per click search engine and has …

Speaking at the eyefortravel Sales and Marketing in Travel Europe conference in Berlin, Jan Oetjen, Travelocity’s managing director Germany, said that the search engine revenues would be cut following the likely consolidation in the travel industry. …

Agrarmarkt Austria, Berglandmilch, Lebensministerium, Raiffeisen Ware Austria and Telekom Austria have combined their forces to create a vertical search engine for Austrian agriculture.

Called Agrarinfo, the search facility currently has 7,000 links to agricultural sites and 3000 user addresses.

Behind the new …

Proximedia of Belgium is predicting that 25% of Belgian companies are likely to switch to using a .be domain name.

European businesses abuzz over ‘.eu’ domain names - INQ7.net

Trade Doubler reports a drop in online advertising sales for loans in July

XiTimonitor has published a study showing that Firefox is truly taking off with European audiences.

Norway and Portugal have been the fastest growers in the last with 19% and 15% respectively. Five eastern European countries score for the …

The far east still heads the league table of most broadband connected countries with South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan all in the top 6. The far east will overtake North America and Europe in the next few years …

Web.de signed up to an acquistion by United Internet on Friday for 200 million Euros and a 5.8% shareholding in United Internet. The deal can’t go ahead until it’s been approved by the German monopolies office - it also still …

CEO of Ask Jeeves has revealed to Reuters plans to roll out the butler throughout western Europe.

Following the IAC acquisition, Ask certainly has more capital at its disposal so it is not surprising to read speculation of a buy-out of …

The Austrian Internet Monitor (AIM) has published its 2005 first quarter figures for use of the internet in Austria with further figures confirming the continuing growth in use of the web. This latest report particuarly reinforces the point that, as …

The very first .eu domain has gone live on the web today - but don’t get your cheque books out yet - this is the registration organisation itself - EURid at www.eurid.eu - which is responsible for managing the new …

Whilst Denmark retains the top spot as the leading e-ready nation even beating the US, Slovakia has moved up 5 places in the rankings from a lowly 39th last year to 34th in 2005 in the latest e-readiness rankings from …