Big Differences - Google.de and Google.com

[HuskyPup]

I am seeing very strange Google.de results for Das Web. Surely these ought to be fairly similar to Google.com?

For example a keyword phrase I have been #1 for years is shown in 8th place with all German sites in front of me, then again for another term selecting "Seiten auf Deutsch" (pages in German), I rank 4th for an English language site with other English language sites straight below me.

I can repeat this across many of my keyword phrases in several Google extensions even in languages from that specific country which is quite bizarre, for instance "pagine in Italiano" (pages in Italian) I am 4th, "pagine provenienti da: Italia" (pages from Italy) I am 5th.

No wonder so many people are complaining!

[tedster]

Google.de has long seemed to be a creature of its own to me. While not explaining all the differences by far, one issue is that Germany has very strict laws that make some content illegal. See [cyber.law.harvard.edu...]

Also, for quite a while, the spam from sites registered in Germnay seemed to be a bit more out of control and in need of some dedicated handling.

Many country specific versions of Google seem to have their own struggles - see this current thread about poor results in google.es [webmasterworld.com]