No Japanese results on Google.com?

[Edwin]

Since this morning, Google.com (regular English version of the site) is returning 0 results regardless of the Japanese query I try. Before, it would return roughly the same number of results as Google.co.jp.

Has anyone else noticed this behaviour? Has there been any word from Google about a strict linguistic split?

[bill]

I'm getting the same number of results on all my Japanese language searches on Google.com and Google.co.jp. I tried similar searches with Chinese and got the same results. Anybody else seeing what Edwin sees?

[Edwin]

I'm getting the problem for ALL searches, not just Japanese ones, but it's intermittent (sometimes I get all results as normal, sometimes none at all).

For example (for the term "news"):-

No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.

Your search - news - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.

[bill]

This is odd. The Advanced Search of Google has always included a language section. I'm not sure how they would benefit from routing certain language searches to local Googles. Users who prefer their SE interface in a certain language but who do multilingual searches would certainly be inconvenienced.

I've been doing Japanese searches all afternoon on Google.com, and I haven't seen this yet. I'm switching between Opera and Firefox browsers and neither shows this. Might it be possible you've installed some sort of toolbar that's affecting your SERPs?

[Edwin]

No. I haven't installed any NEW toolbars for over a year. I doubt it's spyware since I have about 3-4 antispyware/antivirus tools all running at once, including PestPatrol.

[bill]

I'm still not seeing anything like this on my machines in Osaka. You're seeing this on which browsers? Have you been able to replicate this on different machines? I've tried several different machines on different ISPs with no success.

[Edwin]

IE6 with all the latest updates. No new updates installed in the last couple of days, nor any other software. First time I've seen this behaviour since I started using Google in 1999, or whenever it was they fired up...

Having said all that, it seems to have cleared itself up now, but the mysterious error message I posted above was definitely showing up a significant percentage of the time for at least 4-5 hours today.