claus - 10:22 pm on May 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

There are two types of regional searches:

1) Search pages in "Language"
2) Search pages from "Country"

For both types it is possible to find TLDs that are not from the country in question in top SERPS.

Also, the classification is not 100% accurate, so it's possible to see pages in another language ranking high for a "Language" search or pages from another country ranking high for a "Country" search.

>> - what if you put local language on a .com domain and host it in the US?

No problem, afaik. Lots of regional sites are on ".com" domains or some other domain. There are eg. lots of Swedish sites on .nu (Niue) because Swedish rules for domain ownership were pretty strict for a long time.

>> - what about hosting in another country than the one you're targetting?

Server response time would be my biggest concern, not SE's.