Google's Handling of Country Specific Results

[goodroi]

I normally understand what Google is doing but I don't understand how they are handling country specific search results. Let me tell you my story.

I was shopping for some specialty apparel and it is expensive during the season but during the off-season it is can be over 90% discounted. Since I am cheap and smart I decided to check out Australian sites since their weather seasons are opposite to the US. I head over to Google Australia and to be extra safe I selected Google's option to only show pages from Australia.

What did I find? I find Nike and other large American companies ranking high in the results of "pages from Australia". Before you start to think that maybe these large .com retailers are showing Google an Australian IP, I also saw several tiny American companies ranking as well. Based on my searches about 20% were .com domains registered to American addresses and hosted in America.

I doubt that Nike logged into Webmaster Central and made any changes to their country of preference and I really doubt the small websites even know how to do that.

Whats going on G?

[tedster]

Indeed. I kind of understand when a big international enterprise still gets included in the search results for "from this country." But it's just "kind of understand", since it isn't technically precise. Users might still click on those results at times, so after testing it, Google might stay with that kind of blending.

I really don't understand when a .cn domain shows up in "pages from the UK" and the like. That was happening a few months back - possibly during a period of heavy testing of the country specific results algo.

[rainborick]

This sounds like something I've seen Googlers comment on a bit indirectly. As I recall, these comments implied that when a search phrase includes a major company name or trademark, Google will insert the appropriate company's website in the results because that's a natural expectation of users. If that's what you're seeing, and I may be misremembering, it would be interesting to know if those companies had ccTLD's for Australia or if Google's system just returns the primary/home site.

[whats up skip]

There definitely seems to be some very strange things going on with country specific searches.

I suspect that simply going to the Australian version of Google is enough anymore. I think that Google still attempts work out where you are and give you the most appropriate results.

I now think you need to use the far more specific search string to obtain the results you want.

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=search+phrase&gl=US

This is what Google Adwords diagnostic tool generates (minus the test part of the string). The results I obtain are very different to what I obtain in if I simple use www.google.com (I am located in Australia). Based on this, you would have to change the "gl" parameter to "AU" to obtain results for Australia.

I found that changing the search string to:
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=search+phrase&gl=AU

gives the same results as

http://www.google.com.au/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=search+phrase

(for someone located in Australia)

The results are different to using the "pages from Australia" option on the google.com.au search. This time only sites related to Australia seem to appear. The full search string is:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=search+phrase&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

[edited by: tedster at 1:13 am (utc) on Oct. 2, 2008]
[edit reason] de-link the example urls [/edit]