I’ve been busy last couple of weeks working on a small scale site for a friend who has a villa on the Adriatic coast. The villa offers rooms and apartments, and the potential clients come from various countries in Europe. They wanted the site to contain content in three languages - English, Italian and Croatian. This posed somewhat of a challenge, as we were faced with a decision on how to implement multilingual content on a single site, and have the benefit of Google actually indexing it and showing the appropriate pages in search results.

Having addressed this issue before in previous projects, and having read a lot about others’ opinions on best practices, I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a pure best practice in this case, but rather best logic approach. We decided to store content in different languages in subfolders on the site (rather than subdomains). The site is in Croatian by default (root), while English and Italian are in subfolders (/en and /it respectively).

Bottom line is, we have achieved positive results, as most pages are ranked for targeted queries for their appropriate language in the top 20, some even in the top 10, and all this without link building and other off-site SEO. I don’t expect the pages to keep ranking well for too long without additional off-site SEO work, but for now this is pretty good.

This is the second time a site I worked on produced satisfactory search engine results for multilingual content stored in subfolders, rather than on subdomains or separate domains altogether. I am more and more convinced that the choice of content structure should be viewed from the logical/development/usability point of view, rather than worrying too much about how Google is going to digest content in different languages on the same site. The key may be consistency - make it easy for the observer to understand the content structure, and stick to it without adding unnecessary layers of complication.

If content organization seems logical and easy to understand to a human looking at the content structure on a site, I am pretty sure a search engine algorithm will understand it just as well. Naturally, depending on the size and level of localization, a site can require very different approaches for housing multilingual content, as described in this document.

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Firefox is treading into mobile browser territory, and it was about time. Although the concept (Mobile/FennecVision) of porting Firefox to the mobile platform is not that new, this is the first time I’ve seen an actual concept presented to the public. Aza Rask, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has posted a screencast on his blog, discussing the new concept of Firefox mobile. The actual product, once delivered to the public may end up looking quite different than this, but it shows some very interesting solutions to providing a near desktop/laptop browsing experience on a mobile phone.

Looks very interesting and promising, with some nice features as well. While Opera does a good job with Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, and Digia (which announced a beta download of their latest mobile web browser during June 2008), it’s good to have another option for mobile web browsing.

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Viewzi, the search engine that allows its users to choose with what kind of view they would like the results to be presented to them, is open to the public for use as of today. Basically, you get to decide what kind of results you’d like to see depending on what you are looking for (if your search query is “Bob Dilan” then you choose whether you want to see text results, or music files, biography, video). Results are aggregated from various sources on the Internet. So far, only those who have registered to be beta testers/users could use the engine, but now anonymous usage is open (no login needed).

It’s an interested search experience to say the least. I’ve used Viewzi during restricted beta for my own search needs to find things I’d most likely be using Google for for comparison’s sake, and found that majority of results shown to me in various views are quite satisfactory. Then again, if you are a Google SERP nut, you’ll probably have a hard time adjusting to a completely new way of seeing search results on this site, as the interface, although easy enough, does require some getting used to, especially, with years of [enter search engine name here] SERPs. Basically, after a small leap of faith, everything comes together just fine. I think Viewzi, as a fresh approach to searching, is definitely going to stay on the search horizon in the future.

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Here’s a pic of a package containing the new 3G iPhone which has been sent to MacTalk in Australia. It says “Do not open until tuesday June 10th 2008″. Would you wait until then?

Image credit: MacTalk

So, I’m just guessing here, the new iPhone is going to be announced on June 10th!?

UPDATE: this is most probably a hoax, but unlike the other attempts, there are no actual pictures of the phone shown (the box is unopened), so there is still a small chance of authenticity.

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