inbound - 11:17 am on Jun 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

Having had reason to do a lot of comparison between US and UK results recently I would say that Google.co.uk does very well in terms of localisation.

There are sites that scream out that they are from the UK (UK cctld, UK IP, UK Spelling, UK geo identifiers - postcodes, towns, telephone number format etc) so they are easy enough to identify, but there are sites that are less obvious than this that Google.co.uk consistently ranks well but there's little sign of on Google.com.

I believe that Google must put additional effort into the UK market as it sees it as important. It has built up a huge lead in search percentages and makes a lot of revenue from the UK in comparison to other (non US) markets.

An interesting side note is that Microsoft seem to be over-localising results in the UK. I tried searches for a particular type of business in a big US city on all of the majors and was amazed to find Live.co.uk giving results pretty much only from the UK - hence results that were completely incorrect (the city in question shares one of its words with a small city in England).

As for comments suggesting a non cctld domain as bad for click through, I don't agree, or at least it does not matter to many people - most users don't pay attention to URLs from the stats I see, they are just interested in getting the information they want.