Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced.

The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/8389896.stm

Published: 2009/12/02 00:46:39 GMT

The internet regulator has approved plans to allow non-Latin-script web addresses, in a move that is set to transform the online world. The board of Icann voted at its annual meeting in Seoul to allow domain names in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts.

More than half of the 1.6 billion people who use the internet speak languages with non-Latin scripts.

It is being described as the biggest change to the way the internet works since it was created 40 years ago. The first Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be in use next year. Plans for IDNs were first approved at a meeting in June 2008, but testing of the system has been going on for two years.

Technical upheaval

The move paves the way for the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) to be changed so it can recognise and translate non-Latin characters. The DNS acts like a phonebook, turning easily understood domain names into strings of computer-readable numbers, known as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

“This change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread ” Rod Beckstrom President of Icann

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) said the “fantastically complicated technical feature” allowing IDNs would represent the “biggest change” to the coding that underlies the internet since it was invented four decades ago.

BBC technology correspondent Mark Gregory says in the early days of the internet, language posed no problem, as most web-surfers spoke English and those that did not usually wrote in languages based on the Latin alphabet. But this is no longer true, adds our correspondent.

New system to be up and running by middle of next year

Icann said it would accept the first applications for IDNs by 16 November, with the first up and running by “mid-2010″. It is likely the majority of early non-Latin net addresses to be approved will be in Chinese and Arabic script, followed by Russian. Some countries, such as China and Thailand, have already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language. However, these were not internationally approved and do not work on all computers.

Autonomy

Our correspondent says the point of the Icann vote was to create a universal internet address code that will work in any language and every place so all the world’s computers can connect with each other. “Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” said Icann president and CEO Rod Beckstrom earlier this week. “So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.”

Icann, set up by the US government, was founded in 1998 to oversee the development of the net. Last month, after years of criticism, the US government eased its control over the non-profit body. It signed a new agreement that gave Icann autonomy for the first time. The agreement came into effect on 1 October and puts it under the scrutiny of the global “internet community”.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8333194.stm
Published: 2009/10/30 05:13:22 GMT

A study of the global state of broadband has put the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality of its networks.

The research for Cisco found that countries such as Latvia and Bulgaria were better prepared than the UK for next-generation net applications.

The UK was listed among countries whose broadband is “meeting needs for today”.

Korea and Japan continue to dominate the league table, largely due to their commitment to fast networks.

LEADERS IN BROADBAND QUALITY      

South Korea

Japan

Hong Kong

Sweden

Switzerland

Netherlands

Singapore

Luxembourg

Denmark

Norway

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8282839.stm

Published: 2009/10/01 00:20:06 GMT

Google has a 60% share of search queries in the U.S., but that number is 67% worldwide, according to ComScore. In many top and growing internet countries, including Germany, Canada, Brazil, Turkey and Italy, Google has more than 80% of the search market.

So, how are the search wars playing out abroad?

Very well for Google, as the following international data from ComScore show. Note that this data does not include China, where Baidu is dominant and Google is frequently blocked by government censors.

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According to a recent post on WebProNews, Microsoft has admitted a problem with Bing whereby pages marked as NoIndex or NoFollow are being ignored by the ‘MSN Bot’ when crawling a website.

NoIndex and NoFollow Meta Tags can be used to advise search engine spiders to avoid indexing specific web pages. There are a number of reasons why you might want to use these tags, such as preventing duplicate content, or private or non essential web pages from being indexed.

The industry standard NoIndex and NoFollow Meta Tags are recognised by all major search engines including Google and Yahoo. Therefore this problem only appears to be affecting Bing.

According to Brett Yount from Bing’s webmaster team, Bing have acknowledged that there is a problem.

“This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as, http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.”

So, if you have pages within your website that are using these NoIndex Meta Tags, I would strongly recommend checking these pages in the Bing search results and taking appropriate action to establish if they have been indexed in error.

If you would like further information on how to prevent search engine spiders from indexing your web pages I would recommend you review other methods supported by the Robots Exclusion Standard.

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