Forget ccTLDs - it's local hosting time

Has Google local search fully switched to hosting location?

[heini]

Local Google sites, like Google.fr in France or Google.de in Germany offer users 3 radio buttons:
- all results
- results in local language
- results from local country

Results from the country started out as being results from sites under the local ccTLD. Results from Germany so would have been from www.example.de sites.

Now those results include pages in all languages registered under all TLDs. The only qualifier being location of hosting. Nothing else.

This change came, AFAIK, gradually, first I thought it was broken...

But revisiting the option these days it turns out Google has all but abandoned the ccTLDs as denominator.
Local domains have, as far as Google is concerned, become meaningless.

This is something which I think deserves some attention, even though it has been part of some previous discussions here. It think it's a sigificant change.
The importance of local hosting for Google has been further increased. Local hosting is starting to become mandatory.

[weteo]

According to my experience, some people are not selecting "search in my country", but they add +.ccTLD to their queries, e.g. "widgets .de", so it still has sense to have your site on local domain