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Am I the only one who is concerned about the 'Search: Page from $country' feature on google?.
Maybe I'm weeks (months/years?) behind on this topic, but this feature seems to fail WRT the 'global' aspect of the internet, no? We've got Canadian web space, but have built sites for clients from at least 5 different counrties and hosted them with that space.
Needless to say, either our clients will be unhappy or we'll have to find local hosts...
Needless to say, either our clients will be unhappy or we'll have to find local hosts...
...or get domain names from the country. AFAIK, a search for e.g. 'pages from the UK' on google.co.uk will return .co.uk sites, whether they are hosted in the UK, USA, Canada or wherever.
Happily we have some Spanish clients who I am sure will be delighted to pay the highest (or close to) prices for the '.es', which I believe also has to be hosted in Spain (tho not too sure about that one).
This idea is good, but the method seems silly to me. Those three W's that Berners Lee thought up of are a good name for a reason...
has to be hosted in Spain
No, the site doesn't have to be hosted in Spain. A local presence is required, though. Which normally means the domain holder must be at an address in Spain. Since you are writing about Spanish clients, I guess this should not be a problem.
As for the method, it is indeed not perfect, as it would exclude companies using a .com and hosting in a different country, but I can't think of any better reliable solution for country specific searches.
The question is rather how the filtering is done. There are two criteria in place:
IP
TLD
Both are obviously very unreliable. We have had discussions on that where it became very clear that assigining country by IP is as sketchy as by hosting/IP.
The core of the proble is in the fact that Google as well as ATW and all other engines operating worldwide take the approach of building a central worldwide database, which then they try to filter down in order to extract local results.
The alternative however would be to build a database for each country, which when all combined would make the www database.
Engine, great thread, too bad though - I'll hate to have to change hosts, but such is life I guess.
All in all this seems very shortsited, and that due earlier shortsitedness, which resulted in a lot of people having .com addresses rather than .$country. (I suppose getting a country tld isn't too diffucult or much of a pain in the a**)
The business about filtering by host is just plain silly - I'd go as far as calling it a hack, and a poor one at that.
Yes, it is. But then taking into account the development of the search engine landscape this is not surprising.
All major engines started out with a global approach, with english as starting language and dot com as starting TLD.
All local engines, which may have started out from local language and directory results, are gone.
The underlying problem is how to determine country relatedness on the web.
To truly determine if a site is related to a country is a pretty complex (and even controversial) problem. You have to set up criteria for what makes a site belong to a country. And you have to find reliable data to match against your criteria.
You hear talk about improved search engines improving 'this' and 'that' and 'filters' etc., but this just seems amateur.
(maybe it's just that I'm tired and cranky... I love the second reason above)
Maybe 'local' searches could come with a disclaimer explaining the nature of the results that a user will get if they click 'Pages from the $county'. Some users could easily mis-interpret this as what you would expect it to be.
[edited by: mipapage at 10:45 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2003]
I think none of the engines would seriously claim their solution is perfect.
Problem is that they don't claim anything - check the thread out that engine pointed me too. Now, a .co.uk will get you in to the country listings, but it may be hosted in the US, for example. How is that a 'Page from the UK'? How is my .com for a Spanish company in Spain serving Spanish people that is hosted in (wherever) not a 'Page from Spain'?
I get that it's not perfect, but they could improve things by either explaining it to searchers, or my favorite - getting rid of it - it's too much of a hack, but that's my opinion!
Anyway, I'm also choked that I'll have to move some sites now, or get my clients local tld's.
