A recent report on the UK’s online retail market by Hitwise has highlighted the trends in the market, with a particular focus on the build-up to Christmas 2005 so that forecasts can be made about expected activity in 2006.
During November, the ‘big 3’ search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft – have got together to agree a standardised system to allow website owners to submit their site details to the search indexes by using a unified format site map file. This is a positive move for all parties and may lead to further cooperation between the search engines in the future.
A recent United Nations Internet summit held in Athens has raised a number of issues about the growth and future development of the Internet, not least of which is the increasingly thorny issue of the international domain names (IDN) protocol that uses English characters and is therefore seen to exclude other languages and alphabets.
