Noticed non-US sites filling top 10 today?

Searches today seem much more international than usual

[nicheman]

Maybe it's just my imagination, but I'm doing research today on keyword phrases and it seems that most of the top 10 sites coming up are from non-US sites.
The phrases I'm searching for are commonly used in the US.

Just wondering if it's possible for Google to have shifted its ranking formula to weight it more international...

ideas? observations?

[Josefu]

That's actually a good question. It's not the .jp or .cz that denotes the 'language' of the document, it's the encoding. That's why documents without that specification 1) come up in the results no matter the language and 2) come up as gobbldygook instead of 'can't display in this character set'.

By the way, I'd *better* hope for international exposure - I'm a Canadian expat living in Paris and am now the webmaster (well, web-slave : ) of my wife's Japanese site.

By by the way, no culture ever 'gets in the way' of another - perhaps that should have been worded differently. My two centimes.

[doc_z]

Of course, searching for 'Einsteins Relativitätstheorie' should return german results. However, there are a number of language independent words (e.g. 'internet') and there is no reason why only english pages should show up.

Also, spammers don't care about the language. They are simply putting as much as possible keywords on a page.

[takagi]

It's not the .jp or .cz that denotes the 'language' of the document, it's the encoding.

In some cases an encoding could indicate a certain language (Shift_JIS => Japanese, Big5 => Chinese, ISO-8859-8-I => Hebrew), but 'ISO-8859-1' is OK for most West-European languages, and 'UTF-8' is basically the whole world. So encoding won't help much. It seems that Google ignores the meta-language tag like:

<META NAME="Language" CONTENT="abc">

where 'abc' must be replaced by a language code. Most likely Google is just guessing the language by analyzing the text found on the page. See also:

Will a "language tag" help me? [webmasterworld.com]

Multi-lingual pages - language identification / and how Google treats them [webmasterworld.com]

My two yen.

[Alphawolf]

I noticed this last week in SERP's I monitor.

UK sites and a PDF file in top 10.

For one result in particular, two UK domains are in the top 10. One site would seem deserving if G lists various TLD's. The other is the Contact page for the UK based company. Just basic plain text- title, H1 title and contact information.

This was #4 out of 4.2 million on all DC's the past- 7+ days. No direct links to the contact page. The results are for a competitive 'industry name' phrase.

Why are UK results bad for Google.com? Well, in the above case the service is location specific.

If G wants to stick UK results in Google.com then what is [google.co.uk...] for?

AW

[Mozart]

glengara:

I don't have a problem with where the TLDs are from, as long as the pages are in English.
G is aware of the situation as it shows a "would you prefer to view only English results?" message on the second page of some results.
If multilingual results is the way it's going to stay, they maybe should have that option on the search page itself.

Do you mean the option "Would you prefer to view only Chinese results?" as currently Chinese has by far the most native tongue speakers. Or Spanish or French, both of which are far more widely spoken than English?

100 years ago French was the language tres chique, so if Google and the internet were around then, would you have voted for French being the primary language for Google?

cabbie:

but my search term was english so i expect english results

Is "Einstein" English? No, it actually is a German name. How about "democracy" or "anarchy"? They are the English versions of Greek words, so would you like the results in Greek? How about "nation"? Results in Latin, please? "Kindergarten"? Ah, German again. Just by a search term Google can not guess what language you would like for the results, but...

As many others have pointed out, Google offers you the choice of limiting your results to English only (under preferences). And if www.google.us would not redirect to google.com then maybe that version could display geo-targeted US results (as English actually is also spoken on .uk, .au, .nz and plenty of other domains...).

But google.com was, is and should remain the international version and so you should not expect preferential US treatment there. And that is good!

[glengara]

Mozart, strangely enough I'm not getting Japanese/Russian/Swahili AdWords ;-)

[Dayo_UK]

If G wants to stick UK results in Google.com then what is [google.co.uk...] for?

Which is fine but I still think most people from the UK use www.google.com - Google could easily (but dont) re-direct people to .co.uk - and default the search to UK domains.

But then you still have the problem that UK sites are not all co.uk and are not all hosted in the UK.

I think that UK results belong in .com as much as any other as it has been said .com is the international version.

I still think the answer would be a .us (Then the US website owners would have to worry aswell about getting the domain name and the hosting correct to appear in the results)

[weblamer2]

Just my 2 cents, but yes, a UK site has moved up to #1 on my keyword range.

the UK site is a pr0 site as well.

[GranPops]

Mozart
Over half a century ago it was suggested to me that,"it is better to take the risk of being thought ignorant on any given subject, than to join in the conversation and remove all doubt."
The stats on how many of the world's 6 billion odd inhabitants speak what language are easily available.

[Mozart]

GranPops:

Great, you are probably talking about [glreach.com ] right? Or perhaps about [translate-to-success.com ] or [worldlingo.com ] or [worldatlas.com ]?

Glad that at least one of you understands my point. ;-)

Would be too sad if you missed the boat on i18n and lost some money, hmm?