atlrus - 3:20 pm on Sep 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

A 'uk' site will do well on a UK search compared to a G.com search - simply because it competes against fewer sites.

I am not sure about the point you are trying to make. The only reason GoogleUK returns fewer website is because of the geo targeting. You can search for 'football' on both COM and UK, and with COM you will not get an co.uk domain in the first 20 results, yet both return the same number of results.

I own quite a few co.uk domains which I developed for the lack of COMs, i.e. the only "UK thing" about them was the domain name. Before the geo targeting began, all of them ranked great (1 to 5 result) in both GoogleCOM and GoogleUK. When the domain geo targeting started - all of my domains were flushed down, along with every co.uk competitor I've seen on GoogleCOM (and some of them were really good websites).
Currently I cannot find my co.uk domains on GoogleCOM when searching for the domain names before the first 500 results and those are not common keyword domains.