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.

Heavier users of the internet are switching to Firefox in greater numbers in the UK, says Nielsen//NetRatings. According to their latest report, by September 2006 almost 12% of UK users had adopted Firefox.

Whilst for web marketing campaigns, 12% isn’t …

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 …

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 …

Hitwise is predicting that visits to UK online retail sites will see a growth of 8% this Christmas over last. This is a rate of growth fast than last year and search engines will account for 35% of visits …

In a conversation with Multilingual Search, Guy Phillipson, Chief Executive of the IABUK commented that paid search should exceed £1 billion by the end of 2006 in the UK.

Guy says, “Search is the perfect form of persuasion marketing and is …

The IABUK, reported in the Guardian says that paid for search advertising or pay per click, has risen by 57.7% this year over last.

The finding comes in their annual study of online market share carried out with Pricewaterhouse Coopers and …

Media research firm Zenithoptimedia reports that 8 countries will dedicate more than 10% of their budgets to online marketing by 2008. Two countries will already cross that barrier this year - the UK adn Sweden - interestingly not the …

Google’s vertical markets director, Jeff Levick, highlighted the importance of translation, machine translation in other words, during the “Future of Search” panel debate at London’s AdTech, which I was fortunate enough to moderate.Jeff pointed to the fact that there are …

Relevant traffic is a big player in Sweden with a focus on selling clicks from the search engine listings.
Kinnevik , a big investement company has bought 36% of the stocks for 28 million Swedish kronors and is hoping to …

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 …

A recent study provides information on the development of social networks and their impact on Internt traffic distribution worldwide …

UK Plus reports that recent campaigns offering broadband for free in the UK (alongside telephone calls) has resulted in the worst quarter the industry has known in recent times - just 730,000 lines were added in the most recent quarter.

As …

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 …

Well there we have it, Digital Britain rules and the empire is back to it’s former glory. Just released research from Informa Telecoms & Media puts UK as number one in digital content consumption among all the markets of Western …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau - IABUK - has published its bi-annual report underlining rocketing online advertising spend in the UK reaching £490.8 million in just half a year. This means that the advertising spend in the UK …

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. …

MIVA Inc. (NASDAQ: MIVA) has announced the first European partnership with Dennis Publishing UK, for the distribution of a customised toolbar for three major brands: Express, Maxim and PC Pro.

The toolbar will be identified by individual branding for each magazine, …

Tiscali UK has announced the introduction of a Fair User Policy which aims at preventing heavy downloads - Peer to Peer – during peek usage hours. In an effort to privilege VoIP, video streaming, and faster web surfing, …

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

A US City firm has stated that speculation that Google may attempt to buy Yell in the UK is “plausible”. So a rumour then - whose validity is only really supported by the fact that Google and Yell are …

French President, Jacques Chirac has reinforced the development of a eurocentric search engine, baptised ‘Quaero’ from the Latin, by committing France’s new innovation agency to developing a Franco-German search engine to compete with the ‘Americans’. This makes the development …

The Times Online reports that a British firm is creating a new search engine to compete with Google. Previewseek has launched a beta search engine which claims to offer the most advanced search technology in the world - albeit …