Webcertain blog

Worldwide broadband penetration shows Netherlands romping ahead in Europe

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 for ‘connected households’, reports eMarketer. Intriguingly Canada and four European countries help to beat the […]

Big Clique African-American search engine launches in 17 languages

Mr. Olu, the Will Smith of search engines, has created a new search engine for the world – Big Clique – in fact covering 17 languages from day one an amazingly ambitious undertaking! Big Clique claims to offer ‘Just search…’ and nothing else. The choice of languages is intriguing comprising English, Italian, German, Spanish, Finnish, […]

Thrifty.com goes into French, German and Spanish

American car hire organisation, Thrifty.com has translated its site into French, German and Spanish – a sign that more of the larger American travel organisations are recognising the need to speak the language of their customers. Unfortunately, 75% of the page titles remain in English, as do the keywords and page descriptions so they’ve left […]

The very first .eu domain name goes live

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 European top level domain name. Nevertheless, a significant milestone has been passed with the first […]

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 […]

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.

Time spent online is increasing in France, Italy, UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Germany

Nielsen//NetRatings global netview analysis shows significant year-on-year increases in the number of hours per month spent online in all European countries monitored. Outside Europe, Hong Hong achieved the highest increase of 25% – whilst the US dropped. Most impressive are the figures for France (19%) and Italy (15%) where web users have significantly increased their […]

Ask Jeeves goes Spanish

Ask Jeeves has broadened its multilingual offering by launching a new Spanish index – this will give the organisation – currently negotiating its own acquisition by IAC corporation – to compete more effectively with Google, Yahoo, MSN worldwide. It is not surprising they have chosen Spanish thanks to the growing importance of the online Hispanic […]