۞ from Central Europe to the web ۞

Blogger Interface in Hungarian

2007-06-27T09:14:00.000+02:00

Hungarian users firing up their browsers today could spot a new text ad on Google.hu: Újdonság: Legyen blogja pár perc alatt. (New: create your blog in a few minutes) Once you clicked on the link you got to the Blogger home page in Hungarian:

Portuguese Public Service Ads

2007-03-22T15:41:00.000+01:00

A little bit offtopic, but here's a list of the Portuguese PSAs:Curiosidades GoogleQual foi o primeiro computador do mundo?Pesquise e descubra no Google:www.google.com.brjacquard computador BabbageDe onde veio Pégaso?Saiba mais sobre o cavalo alado. Pesquise a mitologia grega no Google:www.google.com.brPégaso MedusaQual é

Some Things Hungarian Webmasters Hate about AdSense

2006-12-12T08:39:00.001+01:00

Today Google has officially announced the availability of its AdSense for Content program for some new languages like Croatian, Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese, so maybe it can be interesting to sum up what were the most annoying problems for Hungarian webmasters during the last one and a half year – since they can have contextual Ads on their sites. (AdSense for Search has been available

Short overview of Czech internet market

2006-11-27T20:16:00.000+01:00

Czech internet is as small and still unimportant as the Czech Republic is. Among other Middle-European markets it has one specifity. Czech internet is pretty much isolated and most key services are provided by Czech companies. Czechia and Russia are the only European countries where local search engine has highest share than Google. Usage of all other non-Czech services is low among "mainstream

Hungarian Google is a bit funky today

2006-10-26T09:20:00.001+02:00

This morning when I've fired up my browser, I've seen the following (my homepage is google.hu ):As you can see two words are overlapping right below the Google logo: magyar stands for Hungarian, and Magyarország means Hungary...Basically there were always two different Hungarian interfaces: Google magyar, which can be accessed at http://www.google.com/intl/hu/ and Google Magyarország which could

Electronic Funds Transfer Available to Hungarian AdSense Users

2006-09-19T10:26:00.000+02:00

Update: It seems that the introduction of EFT for Hungarian users has been postponed for some reason. (Althought it has been recently announced that users from the Czech Rebublic, Slovakia and Finnland can enjoy the benefits of this.) A new function went live on the Hungarian AdSense admin interface yesterday: now users residing in Hungary can also opt for Electronic Funds Transfer: Google will

Hungarian Search Engine Market Overview

2006-09-17T18:20:00.000+02:00

Just as last year I have picked some website statistics and examined which search engines and directory sites are forwarding the most visitors to Hungarian pages. This time I have analyzed 50 randomly selected web sites. The results are based on 2006. July traffic data: the examined websites have registered 909.471 visitors during that month.Google 62.71 % Lap.hu 25.16 % Vizsla24.hu

Dennis Woodside interviews

2006-09-17T18:05:00.000+02:00

google.hu now points to Google Magyarország (Google Hungary) instead of redirecting to google.com, so Dennis Woodside (Director of Emerging Markets, EMEA) gives interviews:gugli.wordpress.com - Some of Google’s steps and challenges in emerging markets: Hungaryindex.hu - Google started pushing forward in Hungary (this is only available in Hungarian though)

...or Name that Hungarian bridge after Jon Stewart!

2006-08-30T13:10:00.000+02:00

Success!Check out the list below: all the propositions which are meaningful for foreigners are currently ranked best, thus occupying the first five positions: Stephen Colbert híd86604[53%] Jon Stewart híd31610[19%] Perl-Script híd9704[6%] Hacker híd8711[5%] Chuck Norris híd7865[5%]source: http://www.m0hid.gov.hu/toplista

Google Inc. acquires google.cz too

2006-08-25T14:12:00.000+02:00

Just as I had predicted, google.cz was the next target of Google Inc. after taking google.hu. Google.cz now redirects to www.google.com instead of Google Czech; similarly to google.hu. Unlike Google Hungary (Google Magyarország), Google Czech Republic never existed, so it will be also an interesting issue when will the next steps be taken by Google in order to acquire higher market share in

Name a real bridge after Stephen Colbert or Chuck Norris!

2006-08-22T17:28:00.000+02:00

Hungarian government was letting people vote on a web site for the name of a new bridge crossing the Danube river. Site administrators decided to let visitors vote in the first round without registration as many times as they liked, so quite a few people have launched their voting bots and asked others to vote for names like "Chuck Norris bridge". This quickly became a viral phenomenon, so even

miner.hu - New Hungarian Blog Search Engine

2006-08-16T16:58:00.000+02:00

Now that miner.hu has been launched, Hungarian users can search in Hungarian blogs with two blogsearch engines:blogsearch.huminer.huminer.hu is marketed as "The Second Hungarian Blog Search Engine", and currently crawls more than 30.000 sites.

Google Desktop Ads on Hungarian SERPS too

2006-08-07T14:37:00.000+02:00

This Google Desktop ad is appearing on Google Hungary's search engine result pages, advertising the Hungarian version of Google Desktop in Hungarian. Why am I emphasizing this? GDesktop ads appearing on English SERPs were first reported in December, so it took just a few monts to localise this particular ad. Seemingly this product has much more importance than Picasa for instance: we have been

First Hungarian SEO Contest

2006-07-28T11:42:00.000+02:00

Just for the record: The first Hungarian Search Engine Competition was announced a week ago. Webmasters are challenged to rank #1 on Google by the end of this year. The chosen keyword is an imaginary or nonsense Hungarian word: "pillangószív" (butterflyheart).Currently 203000 results are displayed by Google: Inspite of the fact that no real prize has been offered, quite a lot of webmasters went

How Much Does a Domain like google.hu Worth?

2006-07-13T09:16:00.000+02:00

During the las few years Google let domainsquatters make money from pages like google.by, google.cz, google.hu. Now that they finally acquired google.hu, one might think about how much profit a measure like this can generate? Is it enough to pay the attorneys? This post attempts to answer this question:Users who typed in this address during the last three years, used to land at this page:Instead

Proliferation of Web 2.0 clones? - del.icio.hu, digg.hu

2006-07-11T23:54:00.000+02:00

As I complained earlier: mainstream Web 2.0 developers just don't care about international users. This gives opportunity for the local developers in non-English speaking countries as the following list illustrates:digg.hu aka linkter.hulinkter.hu (means "linkspace" and digg.hu redirects to linkter.hu) is tightly integrated into and has similar design to the first real Hungarian Web 2.0 site:

Google Inc. acquires google.hu

2006-07-11T16:17:00.000+02:00

Google Inc. finally managed (or simply decided?) to comission patent and trade mark attorneys to acquire google.hu. As I wrote earlier in my previous post (About www.google.hu) the domain name was used by a local company, so the address redirected to their own search engine. Since this search engine is not tied to any bigger portal, its traffic most likely will much less than the current average

Interesting characters in title: ۩۝ இ ண █ ☻ ♪ ♫ ﬗ۝

2006-06-04T17:10:00.000+02:00

There are a lot of interesting characters outside the ASCII range which can be used either as a decoration element on a web page, or even better as a decoration of the page title or description. If these "weird" (sorry for being politically incorrect) characters show up among the search engine results, chances are high that the entry will catch the readers' attention, thus generating higher

Google word stemming for Hungarian

2006-04-16T12:12:00.000+02:00

Google introduced word stemming for English words two and a half years ago, but until recently no occurence of stemming a Hungarian word has been spotted. As you can see on the following screen captures Google highlights not only the given word "kereső" (~searcher, word used to denominate search engines) but "keresés" (~searching, gerund of the verb "keres" =which means "search") too. It's

Социальная реклама от Google - Russian PSAs

2006-03-28T13:15:00.000+02:00

I have just spotted Russian Google AdSense Public Service Ads on http://www.wikiznanie.ruЗнаете ли Вы, Что такое номы? - Что такое номыЗнаете ли Вы, Почему Петр Первый отправился учиться к голландцам? - Почему Петр Первый учиться к голландцам?Знаете ли Вы шесть секретов клеопатры? - шесть секретов клеопатрыЗнаете ли Вы историю "Оливье" - история салата оливьеЗнаете ли Вы, когда и кем был

Google Scholar now indexes Hungarian libraries too

2006-02-21T14:46:00.000+01:00

The Hungarian National Shared Catalogue (MOKKA) has been added to Google Scholar's resources, so Google Scholar users can search for books and publications included in this catalogue.

Search box in AdSense link units

2006-02-02T15:55:00.000+01:00

Some webmasters have recently noticed an interesting form of advertisments: Instead of displaying a topic, AdSense shows a search box with the following label: "Displaying ads in the topics below:". I think that this type of ads are most likely displayed when Google cannot show relevant topics, similarly to "Public Service Ads" which show up occasionally in AdSense in Context units. You can see

Hungarian Search Engine Market Overview

2006-01-29T17:04:00.000+01:00

I have been regularly evaluating the performance of different search engines on the Hungarian web for almost two years. This is a summary of the latest comparison made January, 2005.Introduction of the compared enginesThe big engines:Google search results can be restricted to pages in Hungarian and Google offers a partly translated interface in Hungarian, and this interface can be chosen at

Great deals on Republic Hungarian! Shop on eBay and save!

2006-01-25T18:54:00.000+01:00

I have just spotted this funny ad on my site:Republic Hungarian"Great deals on Republic Hungarian! Shop on eBay and Save!"

Which Hungarian Search Engines are Used the Most

2006-01-24T13:02:00.000+01:00

This graph was a result of an analysis I made a few months ago: it shows the number of referrers by search engines and directories based on the results of 26 randomly selected publicly available web statistics in August, 2005 .It is obvious how Google (google.co.hu) outperformed all of its rivals, and also interesting that the organic referrers from the other three Big Engines (Yahoo!, MSN Search

When will we have Web 2.0 apps in other languages?

2006-01-20T15:36:00.000+01:00

Internationalisation and Web 2.0Having checked the list mentioned in my previous post I was wondering:Hungarians form only a small user base, so it's obvious that there won't be so much software developed for them (in the beginnings, at least), but frankly I was surprised that none of the listed applications had been localized so far (As far as I know, the only exception is Gmail: its interface

Complete List of Hungarian Web 2.0 Applications

2006-01-20T13:47:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately I don't have to work so much to compile a comprehensive list of Hungarian Web 2.0 sites (aka. web 2.0 under the .hu domain...) similar to Rian's impressive list, so here you are:Blogter.hublogter.hu is basically a blog farm, but all of the hosted blogs are organized at a higher level than the usual: The main page features hand-picked blogs and blog entries, and the power of the

About www.google.hu

2005-12-25T20:49:00.000+01:00

Update: Google Inc. acquires google.huNo, http://www.google.hu does not belong to Google Inc., neither to its Hungarian subsidiary, Google Számítástechnikai Szolgáltató Kft.Google Inc. was not quick enough (or simply didn't care) to claim this domain name way back in 2000 when the .hu ccTLD liberalisation took place. Since then this name had been owned by many. It landed at Hírek Média és

AdSense for Content International

2005-12-20T12:53:00.000+01:00

So far I know what happens if the system cannot display targeted ads in context with the content of a page written in English, Spanish, Czech and Hungarian. As far as I could see English pages display non-profit organization ads, while in other languages Google does a kind of self-advertisement: Different quiz like questions are displayed and linked to specific Google query. So the visitor lands

Datos curiosos Google - Spanish Public Service Ads

2005-12-16T12:59:00.000+01:00

The following AdSense Public Service Advertisements appear on a Spanish site if Google cannot deliver appropriate ads. Note that these type of ads are called: approx. "Interesting Google Data" The corresponding search queries are listed in bold, after the English translation. ¿Quiere saber quién inventó el papel? Google tiene la respuesta. Do You want to know who invented the paper? Google

Czech PSAs: Nekomerční reklamy Google.

2005-12-14T12:59:00.000+01:00

These are the Public Service Ad "quiz questions" I spotted on my site despite that it was a Hungarian site, and Hungarian has nothing common with Czech language. The translations are rather rough, since I don't speak this language, but some Croatian knowledge and Image Search helped to figure out what these questions were about.Kdo vynalezl papír?Who invented the paper?Proč je obloha modrá?

Public Service Ads in Hungarian

2005-12-12T10:25:00.000+01:00

The following quiz-like questions appear on Hungarian websites as Google AdSense Public Service Advertisements. The search queries associated to these ads are also included. There are only a few sites optimised for these keywords though (at time of writing), so the SERPs for these quieries are not polluted as for the Spanish equivalents for instance.Ki találta fel a papírt? Who invented the

2005-10-21T16:59:00.000+02:00

This is the first post!