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www-ex : 216.239.33.* Santa Clara, California, USA (Exodus Communications)
www-sj : 216.239.35.* San Jose, California, USA (Global Crossing)
www-va : 216.239.37.* Herndon, Virginia, USA (AOL)
www-dc : 216.239.39.* Washington, DC, USA
www-fi : 216.239.41.*
www-ab : 216.239.51.* Sterling, Virginia, USA
www-in : 216.239.53.* Santa Clara, California, USA
www-zu : 216.239.55.* Zurich, Switzerland
www-cw : 216.239.57.* Palo Alto, California, USA (Cable & Wireless)
No idea where www-fi should be. Maybe Google Japan is more likely to end up at the West Coast but it all depends on load balancing.
However, in January and April 2003 Google has put two data centers on stream which are again located in the US.(source: eFactory)
The last added datacenter was fi. The first message I could find on WW mentioning -fi was made on May 2nd 2003. So it looks (if eFactory is correct) that fi is also in the USA.
Thanks for the info. I am also located in Japan (near Kobe). When you do a search in English, you can see different results on different data centers. But you cannot do a search in Japanese on say -fi.
Do you know how you can do searches in Japanese so that you can see various results at the differemt data centers?
By the way, I notice they also have google.ne.jp. But that is just in English. Perhaps they use it as sort of a page holder for the ne domain.
Ron
The easiest way will be to do a search on www.google.co.jp and once you see the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), change the "www.google.co.jp" into "www-fi.google.com" without changing the rest of the URL and click on 'go' (at the right hand side of the address bar) or just hit the enter key.
For example; search Kobe in kanji on www.google.co.jp [google.co.jp] and change the first part of the URL into www-fi.google.com [www-fi.google.com] and you see the Japanese user interface on the -fi data center.
If you look at the URL you can see the parameters 'q' followed by the query string, 'hl' followed by a language code (en = English, ja = Japanese), 'ie' and 'oe' followed by an encoding (UTF-8 for Unicode, ISO-8859-1 for most West-European languages). These parameters are separated by an ampersand ('&') but before the first parameter there is a question mark ('?'). Having the 'hl' set to 'ja' (maybe hl stands for Human interface Language) can also cause the order of the SERP to change a little bit. A search on an English word can shift a page in Japanese to a higher ranking. But there is also an extra line on the snippet (see more info on the 'hl' parameter in the thread: How to get a 3-line snippet in the SERPs [webmasterworld.com]). Changing between the English and Japanese interface is basicly done by changing the "hl=en" into "hl=ja" (or adding "&hl=ja" at the end of the URL if there is not yet a "hl=en" string).
My two yen.
Thanks for your suggestion. I tried it and it worked. I can see that GoogleJapan is still dancing.
Have you noticed anything different about the way GoogleJapan works from the Mother of all Googles?
One thing I don't like about the Japanese end of the internet is that the webmasters here are way behind when it comes to exchanging links. Most of them still want to use banners instead of text links. I have found it much easier to get links in the English world.
BTW, I sent you a private email. Hope you don't mind.
Ron
