Hungarian Google is a bit funky today

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 be reached at google.co.hu nowadays redirecting to http://google.hu.

Electronic Funds Transfer Available to Hungarian AdSense Users

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 transfer AdSense earnings in Hungarian Forints to the chosen accounts.

There has been no official announcement yet, and Hungary is still not listed among the supported countries in AdSense Help Center though.

Hungarian Search Engine Market Overview

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	7.41 %
Tango.hu	1.43 %
Kurzor.hu	0.74 %
Yahoo!	0.68 %
Lapozz.hu	0.68 %
Altavista	0.40 %
MSN Search	0.38 %
Linkek.hu	0.30 %
Heureka.hu	0.20 %

Google dominates the market

The above graph clearly shows that Google is the market leader in Hungary. The second site, lap.hu is a link directory so this makes even bigger the difference between Google and its competitors.

What changed since last year?

Last year's analysis was made using different set of websites, so the results shouldn't be compared one-on-one. What is still clear that the most remarkable change is that kurzor.hu (having lost traffic coming from google.hu) have had much worse positions this July, it has been overtaken by vizsla24.hu and tango.hu the newest search engine launched this year, while other players have maintained their positions.

Dennis Woodside interviews

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: Hungary

index.hu - Google started pushing forward in Hungary (this is only available in Hungarian though)

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

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 híd	86604	[53%]
	Jon Stewart híd	31610	[19%]
	Perl-Script híd	9704	[6%]
	Hacker híd	8711	[5%]
	Chuck Norris híd	7865	[5%]

source: http://www.m0hid.gov.hu/toplista

Google Inc. acquires google.cz too

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 Czech Republic.

If you are curious how google.cz looked like before, visit http://www.globalsearch.cz/

As a sidenote, two Hungarian domains have been shut down recetly where a proprietary search engine was delivering its own search results:

• hoogle.hu
• magyargoogle.hu (=hungariangoogle.hu)

In addition to the slightly deceptive domain names, both sites looked almost identical to Google's websites.

Name a real bridge after Stephen Colbert or Chuck Norris!

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 the international news agencies have picked the story. Then came Stephen Colbert and called his audience to promote the idea of "Stephen Colbert bridge" by voting on the site.
The first round is over, 25 candidates have been elected (Colbert finished the first round on the first place, but the results have been reset for the second round.) Now you can only vote after registration. This tutorial will guide you through the registration process so that you can still have influence on the name of this new bridge! It's easy anyway, and only a valid e-mail address and a password is needed!

How to vote to name a new Danube bridge after Stephen Colbert or Chuck Norris, etc.:

First step

Visit http://www.m0hid.gov.hu/regisztracio , enter your e-mail address here, choose a password and enter it twice.

Second step

You will see this page if your registration was successful, there's nothing important here.

Third step

Wait a few minutes then open your mailbox. A short e-mail will be waiting for you: click on the link and you will be forwarded right to the page where you can cast your vote, let your voice be heard! (The translated message is: Please click on the link to confirm your registration. Next line: Your password is: ...)

Fourth step

Please vote for Stephen Colbert or Chuck Norris! Click on the corresponding radio buton and push the button "Elküld" at the bottom of the site. You might want to consider voting for "Perl-Script bridge" (híd means bridge), "Hacker bridge" or "Ferenc Gyurcsány the Just bridge" (note: he is our Prime Minister)

The standings of the bridge naming contest can be seen at the "Toplista" menu entry or clicking here: http://www.m0hid.gov.hu/toplista

Thank you for helping us making our politicians a bit more ridiculous! (Some say that the sole purpose of this poll is to hide the fact that the completion date of the bridge was postponed again...)

miner.hu - New Hungarian Blog Search Engine

Now that miner.hu has been launched, Hungarian users can search in Hungarian blogs with two blogsearch engines:

• blogsearch.hu
• miner.hu

miner.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

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 waiting for months to have a Hungarian AdSense Referral button available for Picasa referrals...

First Hungarian SEO Contest

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 in for this competition.

The announcement (in Hungarian) can be found here:
http://kereso.blog.hu/2006/07/19/keresooptimalizalo_verseny_2006

How Much Does a Domain like google.hu Worth?

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 of this:

As you can see, the page where google.hu was redirected (kurzor.hu) was not deceptive at all, (unlike google.by) so you might think that for the majority of the visitors it was obvious that they arrived at the wrong page. Curiously enough it was not clear for everybody, some folks were sure that they used Google when they in fact used a worse search engine developed by a Hungarian company:

Not only comments appearing on my site –where I wrote about what google.hu really was– were clear evidence of this misbelief, but also the large number of results when you searched for google.hu. Google shows 389000 results for "google.hu" while 902000 results for "google.co.hu" and Yahoo! displays 1130 inbound links for google.hu

These facts may help us to determine the value of this domain name, but luckily enough we can get more accurate data too, since kurzor.hu is monitored by webaudit.hu where you can get detailed information about the number of unique visitors, number of visits, and page impressions. These data (this Wednesday –first entire day without the redirection– compared to last Wednesday's traffic) show that the due to the lack of this redirect the site lost approximately

• 38000 unique daily visitors (-66%)
  
• 55000 daily visits (-58%)
  
• 244000 daily page impressions (-54%)
  

Most likely anyone could monetize this traffic easily and cover the expenses of the legal procedure of claiming a domain name like google.hu...

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

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.hu

linkter.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: blogter.hu (a blog farm organized by strong editorial control on its home page) The site runs a proprietary engine, and due to a massive online and offline campaign of blogter.hu, most likely it will establish a solid user base to provide Hungarian users with fresh links.

del.icio.hu

del.icio.hu is in alpha stage since the end of March, but the site just doesn't look promising. This site also sports a proprietary engine, and its owners were to develop quite a few extra features compared to del.icio.us. Maybe that's the reason why they failed to launch a feature complete site so far?

internetmedia.hu

internetmedia.hu: This digg clone has started in March just as digg.hu, but it is based on an open source CMS: pligg. Due to lack of a marketing campaign, chances are high that this page will not be able to build a thriving community.

book.mark.hu

book.mark.hu was launched in July and developed by the same developer as the above mentioned internetmedia.hu and based on the same concept too: Take an open source CMS (this time scuttle), translate it and start a new site on a domain name you already have. All in all this site has more chance to succeed, since its competition is quite weak right now.

Google Inc. acquires google.hu

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 of one million monthly visits. The previous owner of this domain name announced yesterday that the domain had been transferred to Google Inc. based on an agreement signed on July 7th. The DNS servers have been updated to point to Google's server today.

Interestingly enough google.hu now redirects to google.com, instead of redirecting to google.co.hu, or serving the pages from this newly attained domain name.

Update: I have just noticed that the situation is somewhat similar in Czech Republic: perhaps google.cz will be the next target? (More info here...)

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

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 click-thru rates. You can even use this in your contextual text advertisements for the same purpose. There are a lot of characters which can be displayed by most browsers even if no special character set is installed on your computer (like Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc.).

UTF-8 characters in a single HTML file

As you might have noticed, I am also using one of these decorative characters on this site. I have generated a single html file where all the UTF-8 characters are listed so as to pick a new character quickly and easily.

• Download the file from http://www.wideweb.hu/download/
• Open it with Internet Explorer and other browsers, like Firefox
  
• Use the ones which are displayed by most of the browsers you tried.

Google word stemming for Hungarian

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 necessary to use an other keyword to see this phenomenon on the result pages: I have used the word "optimalizálás" which means optimisation:

This doesn't mean that Google has a perfect stemming algorythm for Hungarian words, there are a few regional search engines which do way better job at word stemming like SZTAKI kereső, tango.hu and the PolyMeta meta seach engine. The last screen captures show an example where Google fails to detect plural and other forms of the noun "egér" (which means mouse), while PolyMeta highlights all the relevant keywords appropriately.



We are looking forward to see this happen more frequently on Google results. Hopefully this is a sign that they will care more about smaller markets in the future: as you could see it's time for Google to catch up with regional competitors...

Социальная реклама от Google - Russian PSAs

I have just spotted Russian Google AdSense Public Service Ads on http://www.wikiznanie.ru

1. Знаете ли Вы, Что такое номы? - Что такое номы
2. Знаете ли Вы, Почему Петр Первый отправился учиться к голландцам? - Почему Петр Первый учиться к голландцам?
3. Знаете ли Вы шесть секретов клеопатры? - шесть секретов клеопатры
4. Знаете ли Вы историю "Оливье" - история салата оливье
5. Знаете ли Вы, когда и кем был изобретен сейсмограф?- изобретен сейсмограф
6. Знаете ли Вы, кто был первым человеком, побывавшим на луне? - первый человек на луне
7. Знаете ли Вы историю языка Эсперанто? - "что такое эсперанто"
8. Знаете ли Вы, когда впервые начали отмечать Новый год? - Когда начали отмечать Новый год?
9. Знаете ли Вы, кто был первым покорителем Эвереста? - первый покорил эверест
10. Знаете ли Вы историю самой древней пирамиды? - самая древняя пирамида
11. Знаете ли Вы, кто получил Нобелевскую премию по физике в 1978 году? - "Нобелевская премия по физике, 1978"
12. Знаете ли Вы, какая звезда является самой яркой? - "самая яркая звезда"
13. Знаете ли Вы среднюю глубину океана? - "средняя глубина океана"
14. Знаете ли Вы, какова температура солнца? - "температура солнца"
15. Знаете ли Вы, откуда взялось выражение "деньги не пахнут"? - откуда взялось выражение «деньги не пахнут»?
    
16. Знаете ли Вы, почему небо голубое? - "почему небо голубое"

Translations coming soon...

Google Scholar now indexes Hungarian libraries too

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

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 right now an example of this if you go to the following site: http://v.grocceni.com/humor.html or pick an other file from the root directory list of this server to see more similar pages. An other common feature with PSAs, that if you prevent PSAs from displaying specifying an alternate ad URL, these kind of search boxes will never appear on your page, similarly to PSAs

Sometimes Google displays a topic in link units, with no relevant ads., so when you click on that topic, a similar search box will be presented on the landing page along with the following explanation: "We are sorry, we couldn't find relevant ads to Your topic. Please type an other topic." It's a bit weird that first AdSense tells you that it has relevant ads in a certain category, and when you click on that category, no ads are delivered, only this search box. I would rather consider this as a bug, not as a feature...

As far as I can remember, it was about two months ago when I spotted this kind of ads. Since there are not so many Hungarian AdWords adwertisers, these special link units tend to appear more fequently on sites written in "smaller" AdSense languages. If there are "normal" ad units on the same page, most frequently they either show Public Service Ads or advertisements in other languages, like English, German, etc.

Hungarian Search Engine Market Overview

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 engines

The 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 their Romanian and Slovakian localised versions too. (Both countries have significant Hungarian minorities.) Further pages like the About Google section are not translated, and often the quality of the translations seems to be rather unprofessional. Also some new features tend to be rolled out later here than on the .com version. Apart from the basic Web Search Google Inc offers few other services in Hungarian: AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, and Internet Explorer version of Google Toolbar. Google most likely has some servers in Budapest, and they have a subsidiary, but obviously without any considerable business activity.
  
• MSN Search has a Hungarian interface and the results can be restricted to Hungarian too, but this version doesn't operate on a separate domain name, and search.msn.com just shows up with English interface even if you visit the page with a Hungarian Internet Explorer or you get there using the search box on microsoft.hu... Of course there are a bunch of localized Microsoft products, they have even a headquarters in Budapest.
  
• Yahoo! allows you to restrict the results to Hungarian pages, but if you would like access their database using a Hungarian interface, you will have to visit vizsla24.hu (see below). Yahoo.hu is owned by Yahoo! Inc., but redirects to the central homepage. Currently none of their services is offered in Hungarian.


• ( Ask Jeeves offers its services only in some Western-European languages, and the results can be restricted only to those few languages.)

The local players:

• vizsla24.hu is powered by Yahoo! Search technology but. This service is linked to the biggest portal under the .hu domain: origo.hu


• zoohoo.hu shows results gathered by Jyxobot, the fourth most active search engine robot on the Hungarian web. This Czech technology called Jyxo powers some other Czech and Slovakian search engines too.
  


• kurzor.hu is powered by a proprietary search technology and the popularity of this engine is partly based on the fact that google.hu is redirected to this address.


• keres.sztaki.hu is developed by an academic research institute and its most innovative feature is a sophisticated stemming technology which recognises the different inflected forms ot the given keywords. (Would be a key feature for all engines, since Hungarian is an agglutinating language.)
  


• heureka.hu is the oldest of all Hungarian search engines, and a considerable percentage of its user base consists of the faithful users who started to use this service in the old days.
  

Database size examined using frequent words

I have searched for the 20 most frequently used Hungarian words on the net. These words aren't stopwords for most (international) search engines so summarising the displayed number of results we can figure out which engine has the most Hungarian pages indexed. (These values aren't exact, and in the case of internetional engines they can contain pages written in other languages, since their language recognition algos are far from perfect.) The graph below shows that Yahoo! claims to have the most pages, almost twice as Google. MSN 's performance is not so outstanding compared to the other regional search engines. (Note that Heureka did consider stopwords some of the keywords used.)

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

I have just spotted this funny ad on my site:

Republic Hungarian
"Great deals on Republic Hungarian! Shop on eBay and Save!"