aol.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk simplistic filtering

[hitthedeck]

how come these 2 big companies idea of uk only sites filtering is so basic-only allow .co.uk extension.Wow anyone would think people dont use .com or anything else in the uk. all aol does is filters out anything that isnt .co.uk, yet they use google.The google.co.uk uk only option at least allow uk ips with .com etc..(it could use some improvement to, take into account on page address or dmoz regional listing info)aol.co.uk uses google but doesnt seem to use there .co.uk uk only results.Im not so concerned about yahoo.co.uk as now they are deviating from google.co.uk uk only serps anyway with there results and like the directory default listings b4 its good to have diversity.Still i wish the filtering was better all round-good uk sites are being effected and for relevency sake and for the end user they should try to make sure all uk sites are returned.

[jmccormac]

Determining which com/net/org websites relate to which country is a very complex task. (I know because it is something I have been working on for some time now.) The big search engines tend to build their country specific search indexes from websites with that cctld (eg: .uk) or from websites that are hosted on servers in that country's IP ranges. These methods are not totally sucessful and in the some cases the margin of error over .com/net/org websites can vary from over 50% for small countries like Ireland to about 15% (guesstimate for the UK).

Regards...jmcc

[edneil]

Google uk seems to be managing fine. If I'm in a strange town and want to find something I'll check for details on google because I know they don't filter things out because they end .com or .info or .org.

Their idea of a uk site is not necessarily one that ends .uk
This is another reason why we want to be found by different search engines but as punters only use Google. Its up to the others to catch up by spending time on such issues however tricky that might be.

(Admittedly, I get personally upset that my site isn't recognised by AOL etc as being from the UK but I do think the public suffer)

[jamsy]

Have also noticed that unlike Google, AOL will show all results and not max out to allow only a max of two to be displayed.

a search on aol for example "Great Widgets"

1. site1.co.uk
2. site2.co.uk/a.html
3. site2.co.uk/b.html
4. site2.co.uk/c.html
5. site2.co.uk/d.html
6. site2.co.uk/e.html
7. site2.co.uk/f.html
8. site2.co.uk/g.html

while we all know Google would do:

1. site1.co.uk
2. site2.co.uk/a.html
3. site2.co.uk/b.html
4. site3.co.uk
5. site4.co.uk
6. site5.co.uk
7. site6.co.uk
8. site7.co.uk

This makes the serps look spammy - although i musnt complain since one of my main 2 word key phrase gets me number 2 to 8 inc on a list of 81,600 aol results and googles 249,000 results

However they should address this also in my opinion!

[markymark]

They had the same problem when they were using Inktomi results, so I am guessing this is either something they have chosen to do or some flaw in the technology they use to display the results.