Which engines is still filtering local tld's

Which engines is still filtering local tld's in Europe

[Ove]

Which engines is still filtering local tld's in Europe. Is it still important to registrate local tld's now, i thnink lycos is not filtering that now anymore, we have seen some of fast portals in europe switched to google and google is not filtering tld's.

Search engines in Sweden that not care for tld's

Google
Evreka
Msn
Lycos (spray)
Yahoo

Webdirectories that not care

Sunet
Yahoo
Sweseek
Odp
Kth
Lycos

Any thoughts?

/Ove

[heini]

Local TLDs have been very important some years back. Then the whole filtering for locality has been completely demoted in favour of language filtering. Which makes a lot more sense for the users.

The second reson for the demoting of TLD filtering was the regulations for registering of ccTLDs and gTLDs.
Today we have a situation where a large percentage of domains, which might be registered under ccTLDs are in fact running under gTLDs. We also have a good percentage of domains running under a ccTLD while in fact being owned and served from another country.

So the most important factor today clearly is language.
Nevertheless the ccTLDs still are a factor.
Many local Google sites offer three search options, worldwide, main local language, and results from the country.
The last of those options, results froma country, includes sites, which have the local ccTLD and or local hosting.

A good percentage of users actively chose the third option, it's astonishing. In the discussion on real life german search traffic afigure of 40% was given for users searching filtered for results from Germany.

What's even more important is a trend to geo-targeting in the websearch industry. While it's true that the ccTLDs can and will be only one factor in that process it's very likely a safe bet to stick to local ccTLDs whenever possible.