Nelso.no

Although we've had the Norwegian translation ready for over a year, it's taken us at least that long to acquire the Nelso.no domain name.

Now that we've launched in Norway, we just need a site for Iceland and, depending on how you define Scandinavia, Finland to complete our coverage of the region.

According to Wikipedia:

When a speaker wants to explicitly include Finland alongside Scandinavia-proper, the geographic terms Fenno-Scandinavia or Fennoscandia are sometimes used in English.

I admit to never having heard those terms before.

Early stats for the site show most of the traffic so far is to the Denmark and Czech Republic listings.

Amsterdam listings now 3,622 strong

Which might sound impressive, but a complete Amsterdam business listing set will have at least 30,000 listings when complete.

Top 20 Most Popular Businesses in Denmark

Based purely on page views, these are the most popular businesses in Denmark on Nelso:

1. Folkeregisteret
2. Axelborg Bowling
3. Den Engelske ambassade / British Embassy
4. Bums Kunst & Kluns
5. Strike Tårnby Bowling- og Dansecenter
6. Louis Vuitton
7. Foot Locker
8. Zara
9. Orkide Thai - Massage
10. Nørgaard på Strøget
11. Gabor Cph
12. K3
13. ILVA
14. Havanna Shoes
15. Baby Lou Tattoo
16. NASA
17. Imperial Bio
18. Kroegers House Strike bowling
19. Sandalet
20. Caribbean Café & Cocktail Bar

The Long Tail - Car Dealers in Iceland (California)

We recently noticed a large increase in searches on Nelso for a car dealer in California, with most of these searches coming from Danish users. The car dealer in question is Island Auto Sales in Alameda, California.

Why would Danish users be so interested in this one particular car dealer in northern California? Well, "Island" in Danish means "Iceland", and since the Icelandic economy has melted down, Danish users must think that cars are cheap in Iceland.

Another example of the very long tail searches generated by our localization into 10+ languages.

Välkommen till Sverige

Although the current version is just a draft, and the translation still needs work, we have launched a version of Nelso in Swedish at Nelso.se. Later this month (November 2008) we'll start photography for Malmö (across the bridge from Copenhagen), and then early next year we'll start photographing Stockholm in earnest.

A single London listing

We added a friend of ours, Kate Lye, to the Nelso database. We realized when adding this record that we didn't have a convention for country code for the United Kingdom. The ISO code for the United Kingdom is actually "GB", not "UK" as some would expect.

The problem is this: we put the country code in the URL for a business listing (i.e. http://www.nelso.com/cz/place/140/ for Kolkovna in Vítězná). Do we want the URL to read http://www.nelso.com/gb/place/XXX/ or http://www.nelso.com/uk/place/XXX/? Does it matter to the GoogleBot?