Trying out AdBrite

On our English-language Europe local search pages we've switched to AdBrite for text ads. We'll leave these up for a little while to test how they do in comparison to the Google AdSense ads we've been running for the past few months.

New York Times calls Munich "Germany's Hot Spot of the Moment"

Speaking of Munich (see our last post), The New York Times has proclaimed Munich "Germany's Hot Spot of the Moment".

The article specifically mentions Saf im Zerwirk, a vegan restaurant that is getting very positive reviews. Based on the reviews, even a die-hard steak man like myself might give this place a try.

Women from Dominican Republic confuse Munich with Monaco

According to an article on Deutsche Welle, two women from the Dominican Republic drove from Italy to Munich to pick up their niece who was actually on the Paris-Monaco train.

How did this happen? Well, in Italian, the name Monaco is used for two cities: the famous playground of the rich and famous on the French Riviera, and the German city of Munich. For this reason, the city of Munich is often referred to in Italian as "Monaco di Baviera" (literally "The Monaco in Bavaria").

Skagen, Denmark added to Nelso

We have just completed adding listings for Skagen, Denmark to our database. Many of you might not have a clue where Skagen is, so here are a few stats:

Skagen is one of the more popular holiday destinations for Scandinavians (and Danes in particular). This little fishing village is situated in the far north of Denmark (map), where The North Sea and Kattegat meet, and is a very popular place for sailors. During the summer season the small harbor is crowded with sailboats from all over the region. When you are not on the water, the village offers a large variety of excellent seafood restaurants and other nightlife.

If you are considering a trip to Skagen please make sure that you book well in advance since the hotels and vacation homes get booked very quickly.

24 hours to rank #1 when searching for cafes in Berlin

This is a new record for us. It took only 24 hours to rank #1 when searching for cafes in Berlin (see search results on Google).

But perhaps this was too easy, optimizing for a search term in Czech. Let's try another one: ristoranti berlino. It should be considerably more difficult to rank for an Italian-language search for restaurants in Berlin. We'll check back in a few weeks and see how we've done.

Update: Right after I posted this, we not only lost our top spot for this query, but all our Berlin listings seem to have been removed from Google's index. No idea why.

Listings for Germany

We have been trying out adding listings for Germany (especially Berlin) to the site. Germany is of course well-covered by English and German-language sites, but the competition in other languages like Czech (Berlín) or Italian (Berlino) looks pretty slim.

I'll be watching my Google search traffic to see when we start to come up for searches like "Kavárny Berlín". Based on our experience with Copenhagen searches in Czech, it shouldn't take long.

Allegro restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel awarded Michelin star

According to iDnes.cz, the Allegro Restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Prague has been awarded a Michelin star. This is the first restaurant in the Czech Republic to be accorded this honor.

I haven't eaten there, so I can't comment on the food, but I think that many people in Prague expected Gordon Ramsay's new Maze restaurant in the Prague Old Town Hilton would be the first restaurant in CR to get a prestigious Michelin star. Now he'll need to get one just to tie for first.

Nelso in Polish launched

We've just launched a version of the Nelso site in Polish at www.nelso.pl. This brings the total languages for Nelso to six (English, Czech, German, Danish, Italian, and Polish).

Next up - French and Spanish. We're also hoping to roll out a version in Japanese by the end of next month (April 2008).

Nelso in Italian

We just now launched a beta version of Nelso "in Italiano" (we say beta because for the moment it's mostly limited to food and drink listings). However, most of the localization work has been done to allow Italian speakers to search the site using Italian, including translating Czech place names. For example, the site has no problem handling a search for "cucina italiana ponte carlo" (that is, "Italian food near Charles Bridge").

Googlebot, dinner is served. Come and get it while it's hot.

Centrum.cz sending us twice the traffic of Seznam.cz

Because of the nature of our site, Nelso.cz receives a lot of its traffic from search engines. Most users try a search engine first when looking for local information, so a user goes to Google to search for "hospoda mala strana" and then follows the link to our listings for Hospody (pubs) in Malá Strana. Simple enough.

For the English-language Prague search site, Google sends us almost 100% of our search engine traffic. While it's a little surprising that Yahoo sends us almost no traffic from the U.S., Google is definitely the largest search engine for English speakers and should be sending us the most traffic.

In the Czech Republic, the situation is a not quite what we expected. Out of the three Czech-language search engines that send us traffic, the largest in terms of total market share (Seznam) actually sends the least amount of traffic to our site. In the Czech Republic, search engine referrals come largely from Google.cz (75.6%), then Centrum.cz (15.5%), and then Seznam.cz (8.9%). While I've always been convinced that Google.cz is more popular in the Czech Republic than the press has been reporting, I was surprised to see Seznam.cz dead last in referring users to Nelso.cz, and a distant third at that.

There are a number of possible explanations for this: Seznam hasn't indexed Nelso.cz as thoroughly as Google or Centrum, Seznam's ranking algorithm doesn't favor the way Nelso.cz is structured, or perhaps Google is stronger in Prague and therefore appears bigger from the perspective of a Prague-centric site. I'd be interested to see stats from other Czech sites to compare with ours.