rencke - 2:34 pm on Feb 3, 2001 (gmt 0)

Welcome to the European forum and to WebmasterWorld, VladT and Gray.

I and my fellow moderators hope that you will like this place. It is like a "University of Search Engine Optimization and Webmaster Techniques", with an enormous amount to read - at present more than 25.000 posts.

Please take a moment to view the charter [webmasterworld.com], where you will find information about the European forum. Because of its special fact finding nature, it has more than 40 continuously ongoing discussions - one for each country. In order to view them all, you will need to set the list box at the bottom of the forum menu page to "Show All Discussions". Or just click here [webmasterworld.com].

You will find more information about this forum in the charter [webmasterworld.com]and in the Moderator's chat room [webmasterworld.com]. The latter is also available in - German [webmasterworld.com], French [webmasterworld.com], Italian [webmasterworld.com], Spanish [webmasterworld.com] and Swedish [webmasterworld.com]. (Feel free to donate a Russian translation)

A couple of tips: there are two useful features here at WebmasterWorld, not commonly found in other discussion fora: flags and e-mail notifications. When you see a discussion of particular interest to you, you can click "Drop flag" at the bottom of the page, and the url to the discussion will then be saved in your own local bookmark file, which you can view by clicking "flags" at the top of each page. You can also subscribe to e-mail messages each time something is added to a forum or to a discussion. From the forum menu, just click on "E-mail Updates" to subscribe to updates for the entire forum. From inside a discussion you click on "E-mail notification" to subscribe to updates for that discussion only. There is also a brand new and very quick site search to help you find what you are looking for. Try it!

There are two classical discussions here at WebmasterWorld that I recommend you to read if you haven't already found them: "One size fits all SEO" [webmasterworld.com] and "Thou shalt not..." [webmasterworld.com]

I took the opportunity to visit www.searchengines.ru using AltaVista Babelfish [world.altavista.com]. All I did was to enter the url, select Russian to English and click "Translate". I could then surf the lively discussion board and read it is easily as I read WebmasterWorld. Well... To be sure, automatic translations work best with correctly spelled complete sentences without unusual technical terms, but I could still get a pretty good idea. Try it - you will laugh yourself to death over some of the things you have written :) Who knows, I may even take a deep breath, register and post something myself translated into Russian by Babelfish. That could be fun.

I will be starting to update the main post on Russian search engines and directories after the weekend, using your excellent information. In the meantime - keep it coming. We want to know all there is to know. WebmasterWorld is the only discussion board in the west that has anything at all on Russian search engines in English.

- Jan