Noticed something interesting with Google today

[budbiss]

I typed in "drivers license center" and it returned results only from within my state. Is this something new? I never noticed it before. Is it doing this because I have a cookie that documents which state I live in? I assume another way Google could be doing this is by looking at your IP address.

Also, as a test, I entered only 'drivers licence' and this prompted a nation-wide search.

In any case I just thought that this was somewhat interesting.

[OptiRex]

I typed in "drivers license center" and it returned results only from within my state. Is this something new?

No idea.

I entered only 'drivers licence' and this prompted a nation-wide search.

This is UK English.

[texasville]

I also noticed on a query yesterday, several results that contained my small town. I thought it very odd considering the pages I checked were duplicates of state pages.
I was not in a custom google either.

[PCSceo]

I am seeing that as well. I live in Pennsylvania US.

That is very odd.

I do not have any personalized settings set either.

[gregbo]

I just tried this and my top 3 results come from PA, US. However, I'm not there.

[oaktown]

Not happening on whichever dc I'm hitting. I'm in CA.

[goubarev]

For me the "drivers license center" brought up the PA DMV site. I'm in California... and so is my IP range - that has been assigned to Southern California Hosting company for at least 4 years...

I don't think they do Geo Trageting for main results - not there yet... If they did, that would've been totally awesome!

[MissusC]

I get PA too and I am not even close to that state.

[SuddenlySara]

Pennsylvania US is what I get...I should get Laguna Beach where I'm from right?

[Bewenched]

searched for: drivers license center
without quotes and with quotes .. got the same results.

I got the pennsylvania results as well and I'm in Texas

[tedster]

budbiss, you didn't mention if you were logged in to Google in any way -- if you were, you may well have been seeing personalized search results rather than the generic and default results.

For a minute, I thought I was also seeing something personalized, because the top results were all from states where I travelled very recently and worked online. But I'm only seeing what everyone else here reports. False alarm, it was just a coincidence. Guess those states do better SEO ;)

[RandomOne]

I get that and its so annoying, if I want stuff from my state I'll add it at the end of my query. I use the google.com to get info worldwide but it has reverted to local for the last year and now its getting more specific. Google is becoming really crap. Yahoo Yahoo!

[shogun_ro]

I search for that keyw on www.google.ro with hl=ro for your keyw
The first 2 results are for Pensylvania and the third from Pitsburg.
Im located in RO.