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After that, what would your next 5 "english based sites not to miss" for submission of .com's? I'm looking for se's not directories.
I've tried to read here and sort it out. It is still not entirely clear who the real top players are after the majors.
Four more? Can't think of anything big except for AOL Inktomi or Infoseek.
I've had some very good referrals from there at times, but not lately. It's been around for some time so I'm sure they have a large number of dedicated users.
Horasz
For Germany you may not forget Infoseek.de, the former german subsidiary company of go.com;-)
(BTW - in Europe are almost 100 mio people who speak german)
The US majors are wannabes in most countries here, not top players like in the US. As summarized in the post "EUROPE: The search engines you cannot do without #1 [webmasterworld.com] each country is dominated by one or two local players. Three at the most. These are the ones you cannot do without.
Generally speaking, most of them will accept a dot-com site if it is in the local language. But there are many exceptions to this rule. Some of these can be found in the discussion threads for each country. For others, we are still awaiting local experts to arrive in this forum to help us out.
I am not sure what you mean by "english based sites not to miss". Are you referring to engines that offer a choice between local language and English for the interface and add URL pages? That doesn't seem to me to be a good way to select engines for a European strategy.
These are early days yet, but I can tell you with a high degree of certainity that 5 "english based search engines" plus the 5 US majors is not going to get you very far in Europe. In several countries - like Denmark - the totally dominating player is still a directory (Jubii). The European scene is far too complex for a convenient short list, much as though we would all like to see one.
Sorry if I ruined your day. Ask again in a year, when there has been a shakedown among the European search engines. I'll bet you a beer that Fast and Google will be really important then, because local engines will be licensing their technology and using their huge indexes. The reason: The web is growing a lot faster in Europe than in the US. Keeping up with the growth will call for top modern cost effective technology, since the hardware investments can otherwise not be paid off. The stuff that many of the locals have now won't cut the mustard in a year, so to speak. The best providers are probably Fast and Google.
Jan
I am already playing them pretty good in Google, Fast, Euroseek, and against my better judgement, Goto. Currently euroseek, fast and google are generating fairly even with Euroseek having a couple of huge weeks in december. I've been submitting the urls around for about three months trying to find the real winners.
So far we've not be tearing up the net with referrals, but have generated a few sales to bookstores (bulk) for them (all 4 bigger sales came in from euroseek). So the clients are happy thus far.
I am just trying to figure out where to focus the next phase of effort at.
Lastly, nice work on this forum Rencke.
This is tricky. What you might zero in on are small language areas with a high level of understanding of English. Small language = expensive books in local language. High understanding of English + high local book prices = high propensity to buy much less expensive books in English.
The Nordic countries are prime examples. Upwards of 40% of all searches made in the local engines are in English anyway. Fast will give you excellent coverage, thanks to the four SoL SE:s. Add Altavista and you've pretty much got it. You already have Google, which is getting good press coverage up here and probably on its way up. Also used by local engines in several other countries.
As to the rest, there is no rule of the thumb for something like this. Go through the discussion threads for the popolous countries and look for engines that neither require local language pages nor local domain. I think there may be a few. Remember that people who are likely to buy books in English are also likely to use big name American search engines.
Scandinavians have very good understanding of english, and they tend to use the majors when looking for english content.
But as mentioned above - you have got to have the local language content. Even the local domain extensions is pretty important. Many of the danish clients I talk to feel uncertain going to a .com or other non .dk domains. They want to be sure that they are dealing with a local company.
Maybe this fades out when they are using the international engines, but it certainly is an important factor entering the EU market.
It's a tricky one ;)
I just remembered today about 1 site..called:
www.searcheurope.com actually this is a directory...not really good, not really bad so....I'm getting some traffic from there so it's worthy to try it.
Anyone else heared aboutit, use it?
Horasz
The last update was about the beginnig of December. Usually they updated their database in a 3-4 month period. When i submitted our url, it was indexed in 2 months.
Others?
Horasz
Re Searcheurope. Looks like an ODP clone. Never heard of it before. Anyone?
I submitted to euroseek on Jan 3, 01. I didn't get the message from them that you got. Everything went okay. But their spider hasn't been by yet, and our site doesn't show in their database.
I've submitted to euroseek before and had my site accepted, but I'll give you this advice. Submit your site, and then get on with your life. On my first site submission, I waited so long for them to come around that I forgot euroseek even existed. I clicked on the engine by mistake a few months later and found the site there, every page indexed.
I'd already forgotten about this submission until I came to this forum. Now I'm going to have to forget about it all over again.
They received some venture money two years ago and went on a spending spree. A lot of advertising across Europe.
Now the money is gone and rumour had it they would close operations. A couple of weeks ago they annouced that they too where quitting the Portal plan and would be concentrating on the search.
