Non-English engine but English searches - why are they different?

[garyr_h]

I should clear up what I mean by the title: using a non-English engine such as .com.hk or .com.mx, for example, but searching in English.

I'm talking about not clicking the "search in English" link, but using the regular, non-filtered engine but searching in English.

Several people, including me, have noticed how different the results are within these searches. Even though many of us are saying the results are "better", I think most of us are a bit bias on what we consider to be better.

When clicking the "search in English" link, the results generally look quite similar to .com.

In order for us to better understand the results (and maybe use that to analyze why are sites do better on one compared to the other), I think it's time to talk about and analyze what we are seeing.

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My website was hit by Panda in Feb 2011, Apr 2011, and by a few regular updates since then, most notably in late-December and late-February. However, when searching within these, my site often is ranked quite high, almost (but not quite) to pre-Panda levels.

Is it possible that these results don't have Panda figured in? Or possibly something with synonyms?

What are you guys seeing?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You're over analyzing.

Fact: if you get 1000 visitors today they will likely arrive on 900+ different keyword combinations. You can't possibly track them all or know which Google has associated together. Heck it changes on a user by user basis.

Language: what do your logs tell you is the primary language spoken by your visitors? Odds are it's the same you are writing in and so trying to SEO your way into serps of a different language would be... well, pointless.

Panda has you grasping at straws, I feel for you there, but the solution isn't in understanding why Google returns different results based on language from different engines. (hint: they are independent and on their own schedules)

[lucy24]

Now I'm curious about the opposite. If you're nominally searching in English (hl=en in a non-English-speaking country's google) but use non-English search terms, will you get different results than if you used the intended language in the first place?

Answer, without even testing: Well, you'd have to wouldn't you? Each thing you change leads to a new set of results.* Even within English: .uk, .ca, .au and so on all have their own lists.

I tried one search wholly at random. A bit of overlap, but definitely not the same. (Among other things, google.no did not include a result from the Danish wikipedia among the top 10 ;))


* Food for thought. Deep in the bowels of g###'s computer, does there exist a "real", normative, perfectly neutral ranking?

[garyr_h]

I'm not talking about my logs. I'm talking about actually personally using .com.mx and .com.hk and any others. The results look "better" to me and others within the Google Updates thread.

I wanted to try to help analyze why the results are so different and why we are thinking they are better.