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Try clicking on the "Google.com" in the lower right corner of google.ie. That will take you back to google.com. Let me know whether that's sticky or not--I think it should be sticky.
anyone care to share their knowledge?
Shak
That google.com link worked and it is sticky.
;)
How do you get listed as an Irish page. If you are an Irish-owned, Irish-based and Irish-registered company with a web site about Ireland written by Irish people and designed and developed by Irish developers, yet you opt for the extra convenience (and lower cost) of a .com domain and a US hosting location, then you are not Irish?
HOW could a search engine know this? The only reasonable way to figure out which sites are Irish is that they have a .ie domain name, be hosted in Ireland, or both. If the domain is a .com and hosted in the US, there is no way of knowing it is an Irish site. However, IMO Google might be wise to list sites as Irish if the have a .ie domain name OR are hosted in Ireland, and not require both. I've gotta figure requiring both means tons of Irish sites are getting excluded.
Yes, I am in the directory in several places, none showing in SERPs. I don't think they could use that as it's based on content, not the origin of the content (e.g. an American Irish music fan has as much right to be in there as Daniel O'Donnell).
RFG
Your theory of either/or seems right. I looked at hotels as well as I know some people here in that industry. Of the ones I know that are showing, the .coms are hosted locally AFAIK.
For me, I've never taken to regional versions of engines, and go mad when I have to invent roundabout ways of checking SERPs on Lycos. The reason I have so little faith in them is precisely illustrated here. Given what I've seen of Irish ISPs (not all, I know) why should I be forced to buy hosting services in a given country just to prove my nationality? I've got a passport for that. Nor do I see why my major competitor should be excluded from competing with me just because their Dutch. That, after all, is what the EU is supposed to be about. Lastly, such parochialism runs against what I always understood to be the whole idea of the net.
I DO like regional directories such as Yahoo UK&us. Largely because they allow your query to be interpreted in a local way. So search for "newspapers" and it's reasonable to offer you local papers first (but it doesn't matter where they're hosted). I also love Google's Gaeilge: though it's not something I'll use very often I appreciate the effort, GoogleGuy.
It seems that regionals work best when they focus on being useful to USERS from the region, rather than users from anywhere seeking CONTENT from the region. (There's no reason why a Mexican visting Ireland should come to google.ie to plan their holiday.) We as SEOs and webmasters may be responsible for blurring the requirements and encouraging the engines to fall between these two stools.
Maybe this is a good chance to tell GoogleGuy and others what you think should make a regional, regional.
I asked MakeMeTop about the Google.UK position, and apparently regional directory sites are not yet included.
The number of Irish (.ie) websites is comparatively small due to mainly to the .ie domain name being the most expensive in Europe. Out of 28064 active .ie domains, some 21959 have websites. However the fact that the many .ie domains are no longer maintained and there has been no major cull of .ie domains for the last few years (only 138 domains deleted since December 2001) means that some of these sites are walking dead. The estimate of active .ie websites, based on the last-modified dates from the websites and holding-page sites among other things, is 12494. The activity in Irish owned CNO domains is completely different. On some months, up to 1000 Irish owned CNO domains are deleted and 1500 new Irish owned CNOs are registered.
At times, I wonder if it is even a good idea to run an Irish search engine/directory site. Backing is non-existent and government funding agencies are more interested in funding "infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of word processors" operations. Over the past few years, a pile of "Irish" search engine sites have either disappeared or have never gotten off the ground. The means that Google and other big search engines do not face much local competition. Google's main problem when it comes to localisation is that the lines between CNO and a cctld like .ie are blurred and there are many more sites in the CNO set than the .ie set. (A very rough test using the some of the methodology identified about 2.5 Million European CNO domains. At a guess, possibly 1.5 may have active websites. But the problem lies in determining whether these are actively maintained websites.)
Regards...jmcc
The 'Irish problem' has occupied minds for over 800 years, it will be interesting to see the Google solution :)
Perhaps Google needs to add another META tag to its NOARCHIVE, etc. options - if they had a REGION tag, webmasters could specify which regional google(s) they'd like to be indexed in. To stop abuse they'd probably have to ignore all but the first two, and they'd need to create a "United States" search as well.
But with small countries in Europe I don't think it really makes sense having a separate search - as they've recognised at least for Lichtenstein. With the Union, organisations and individuals will increasingly be linked across the continent, and separate search engines will just force e.g. hotel chains to have web sites in every domain, which is ugly.
if Google are saying that Ireland is 26 counties only - then that could cause some interesting discussions
There's an Israeli Google but no Palestinian one... and no "Return pages written in Basque" option that I can find, either!
Regards...jmcc
The Dmoz Regional/Europe/Ireland section is not immediately usable by SEs as input. One reason for this is that there are companies that watch the expiry dates of CNO domains listed in Dmoz and if the domain is not renewed, they will reregister it and set up an adverts page. The Dmoz continues on, blissfully unaware that the domain has changed hands and the website no longer accords with the review.
Another problem with Dmoz's websites listed as being Irish-related is that they are not necessarily hosted in Ireland and in some cases are not Irish. I think that ANU has about 250 or so active CNO websites and about 150 .ie websites. However Google's specification for what is an 'Irish' site seems to be based mainly on using the .ie cctld as the key. Using the country level domain to determine what is a site relevant to a country is a quick and easy fix. Indeed many of the Irish search engines of the last few years have used the same approach. They also rely on user submissions for the CNO websites or will scavenge other Irish owned directories for data. And that is where things can get very nasty. Once these entries appear in these directories, they are rarely updated. At least 4000 Irish owned CNOs were permanently deleted this year and at least another 5000 moved or reregistered. The constant deletion/shifting/reregistration of CNO domains makes it difficult to track CNO websites for any particular country.
I just went into the directory on Google.ie and entered Waterford as the search term. The first result is for Waterford Bikes (waterfordbikes.com) which is in the US. This seems to be another major problem facing Google or indeed any search engine. Many Irish towns and counties will have places in the US named after them (indeed many US placenames may have European equivalents). The appearance of placenames in CNO domain names and consequently the URLs creates a real mess for any SE. Approximately 23000 CNO domains contain the word 'Ireland' but how many of them are really Irish? Just checking on Dmoz's links, 2394 links have .ie, 3541 have .com, 255 have .net, and 142 have .org. Interestingly, 86 have .uk. (This does not include the Six Counties entries which are in the UK/NI section of Dmoz. I haven't had a chance to import that to the database yet.)
Regards...jmcc
The problem is in quantifying what constitutes a small country. For most search engines, .ie is a small set. Lichtenstein is small by comparison but so is Greece. However Belgium which is geographically small has about 200K .be domains. The case with Ireland is that more Irish owned domains are likely to be CNO rather than .ie. Some Irish companies have dual (.ie/.com) registrations though frequently, the .ie cctld is used as a domain of last resort where comanies were too slow to register a CNO variant of their name.
Companies that trade internationally will generally have a .com and perhaps a local cctld equivalent to protect the trademark. However for marketing purposes, they generally use the .com. This is true in the case of Aer Lingus and Ryanair.
From the SE point of view, what Google is doing with localised search engines makes sense. It is essentially reusing a subset of its data. That localised reuse allows it to sell targeted advertising and do branding deals with ISPs. (Google did a branding deal with the BT owned ISPs in Ireland (Esat/IOL/Oceanfree) last year. SEs that fail to reuse their data in such manner are making a commercial mistake.
Regards...jmcc
Can't be cookies, as I don't take them from G, any ideas?
But if the product is a woeful as google.ie's current 'pages from Ireland' results, why should any commercial enterprise use it? I have no problem with Google - or any other SE - trying to monetise their product, but the 'pages from Ireland' results just seem so lacking from a user perspective. It has really dented my faith in Google's so-far exemplary service.
The example of ANU was used because I know their servers are hosted in Ireland, yet I can't find any .com clients of theirs listed in the 'pages from Ireland'. However, .com clients of other Irish hosts such as hosting365 or ieinternet ARE listed. Bizarre.
The example of ANU was used because I know their servers are hosted in Ireland, yet I can't find any .com clients of theirs listed in the 'pages from Ireland'. However, .com clients of other Irish hosts such as hosting365 or ieinternet ARE listed. Bizarre."
The tie-in with IOL/Esat/Oceanfree seemed to be more of a marketing deal than a deal based on the performance. As a brand-name, Google has immediate recognition and I think that this is what the IOL/Esat/Oceanfree people were banking on. But I do not think that these marketing people know very much about search engines or the problems of creating a good, localised dataset.
Not sure about the ANU domains but there is the possiblility of .ie/.com overlap with Hosting365 and IEinternet.A few of them seem to have predominantly .ie inbound links. If this is the case, Google seems to be relying on the .ie websites for the bulk of its Irish webpages links and supplementing it with Dmoz data and CNOs with predominantly .ie inbounds.
Regards...jmcc
