Webcertain blog

6 countries sign agreement to take European libraries online.

Reported by Austrian TV, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary have signed an agreement to take national libraries online – in something of a re-buff for Google’s idea to do the same. The idea was born of European Commission President, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso and EU Council President Jean-Claude Juncker. Google’s US project encompasses […]

France and Germany combine to create European search engine?

European concern over the power and influence of the American search engines is well known. Now Jacques Chirac has announced that one of the new joint projects which the German and French governments will co-operate on, is the creation of a new European search engine. They’re trying to take a leaf out of Google’s book […]

IAB study in France says 6.4% of advertising budgets go online

The proportion of French advertising budgets is going out at an enormous rate. Now taking 6.4% of the total budget – but more significantly the rate of increase has grown from +78.1% in 2004 to +91.7% in the first quarter of 2005. %GC_SERVICE=484% This means online spend is doubling year on year – according to […]

Online transactions to exceed 10 billion Euros in France in 2005

The ACSEL panel, which brings together the leading e-commerce companies of France with figures then aggregated by Price Waterhouse Coopers, is forecasting a total e-commerce turnover for panel members this year of 10 billion Euros. Their latest report shows that the 24 members of ACSEL saw an increase of 54.8% in turnover to 671.2 million […]

Yahoo's relevancy may be catching Google, says French study

A study carried out by Le Journal du Net has concluded that Google is still ahead of Yahoo and MSN in terms of the relevancy of results presented – but the gap has narrowed between Google and nearest rival, Yahoo, especially in certain specific categories. But MSN still has some catching up to do. Le […]

Overture and Lycos increase cooperation

Overture and Lycos are to work closer together in Europe, it has been disclosed. Following an agreement which is to run for several years into the future, Lycos will link its portal more closely with Overture in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands using the content match system.

French and Swedes are big online gamblers

Shocking figures from Nielsen//Netratings suggest that online home users in France and Sweden are the biggest gamblers in Europe with both countries seeing reaches of 22.1%. Germany, the UK and Switzerland had a similar reach of 14 – 14.5% – whilst the Italians and Spanish haven’t really caught onto the trend to date with reach […]

Higher levels of local search in Germany than the UK or France

Volker Gläser, search director for Yahoo Deutschland, says that local search is more significant in Germany than the UK or France sometimes reaching levels as high as 30% of all searches. He puts this down largely to the division of the country into “Länder”. In February, Yahoo launched in beta a local search facility across […]

Wanadoo launches contextual pay per click system in France

Wanadoo has announced a pay per click system for contextual sponsored links on Wanadoo and Mappy which has been nicknamed ‘Wanadooclic”. The links will be bought via a bidding system. The announcement was made by Luc Tran Thang who is the Director responsible for the Wanadoo portals. It should be noted that Wanadoo already features […]