Sounds a little like a marketing ploy IMHO. Don't IOL, Oceanfree and Yahoo UK & Ireland all use Google?
That is exactly what it looks like. ENN tends to run whatever press release it is handed. IOL/Oceanfree did a deal with Google last year for an Oirish [1] version of Google as their site engine. (It was more a branding exercise for IOL/Oceanfree as well.) The problem is that Google cannot reliably decide what is an Irish site. The method it has been using to date has been based on IP. That is extremely unreliable as a lot of Irish websites (probably over 50%) are not actually hosted on Irish IP ranges. The other method that Google uses to generate country specific flavours is based on the cctld (two letter country code (eg .ie .uk .de)). It is a quick and nasty way for search engines to country brand their SE but the results are varied.
Regards...jmcc
[1] Oirish: Pseudo Irish. Attempt at being more Irish than the Irish themselves etc.
Yahoo uses Google, and yet they do Espotting across Europe, so where's the ploy here?
Am I missing something here? Isn't this just Espotting adding another two partner sites? I don't see a marketing play there.
Marketing ploy not play. Basically Espotting gives the press release to a load of magazines/sites that it knows will not question it. The press release then is run as news by these mags/sites. While the Espotting press release may claim that 61% of Irish searches are run through these sites (and I would dispute the accuracy of these figures since the biggest ISP in Ireland does not use Google in this branded manner) there is no evidence for the claim. Google perhaps has the biggest search engine profile in Ireland but the MSN engines have fairly high placings as well.
I just checked the IOL search option for 'cars'. The Espotting Sponsored Links section gives me a whole pile of links that are .co.uk. These links are pretty well useless to me as I am in Ireland. Going to the sign-up options for Espotting on the IOL site is another good Oirish example. I don't see the rates in Euros but rather in Pounds Sterling. The currency here, as in most of the EU is the Euro. Limiting the search to webpages from Ireland still throws up the .uk sites.
Perhaps Google itself accounts for 61% of Irish search traffic but I would not consider that IOL/Oceanfree is the major component of this. Most people that I have seen using search engines here tend to type the full URL for Google (Google.com rather than .ie).
Google's haphazard method of deciding what is a site in a country seems to be largely determined by IP and by cctld code. For a country where at least 50% of websites are hosted in the US or the UK, the results from the country specific searches tend to be patchy at best and missing large numbers of sites at worst.
Without verifiable statistics on Espotting claims, the buyer had better beware. One great way to irritate users in a local market is to offer them sponsored links for sites in another country when they are searching for local sites.
Regards...jmcc
I find this really, really annoying! If I type in google.com I want to go to google.com, not google.ie - I just end up clicking the google.com link in the .ie site anyway. If I wanted to get an Irish only listing I'd go to google.ie, or another Irish & UK targetted search engine.
