Google's unfair discrimination

How Google is in breach of the Free trade agreement

[allanp73]

I want to say that I really like Google but after investigating into its serp practices I realized that there is unfair discrimination. As a Canadian with .com URLs registered to a Canadian business and the sites hosted in Canada, I am unable to complete equally with US sites for US city markets. This is in direct violation of the Canada-US free trade agreement, which Google as a US company must abide by.
I discovered the difference in serps after a phone call with a US client where I tried to show him some of the rankings I had. The sites were information sites about US cities, when I viewed Google.com the sites appeared in the top10. However, when the perosn in the US viewed the sites they were out of top100 behind sites with lower pr, less or no relevence. Today I was able to see this for myself by using ip cloaking software to hide my ip when viewing Google.
I would like to hear Googleguy's opinion. I hope other Canadians and businessmen in similar situations will comment.
Thanks for hearing me vent.

[Krapulator]

From the Google TOS:

"The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales"

[chiyo]

I sympathise with Alanp but i see Krapulator's point. Google never pitches the main index as a business directory or advertising medium - that's what adwords is for - the google main index ultimately can only rank informational sites fairly and well.

They only "tolerate" commercial sites so far as it helps them. Fair enough. Like all SEs, Google is slowly and surely migrating commercial content to paid listings such as Adwords, as far as they can - and organically.

If you do want to use Google for advertising or selling, you build your own swings and roundabouts on an insecure foundation.

This does not apply to you Allanp, but ive ceased to feel any sympathy for those who say that their families security depends on monthly google updates. If they are anywhere close to being a smart busineeman and have done their research they will know that is no basis for any business. The mirage that it is is based on outdated information and experience from sites and entrepreneurs who were able to take advantage of the early development cycle of the Search engine business model. That cycle has well and truly passed.

[mrguy]

I agree with you chiyo!

Google owes nothing to nobody.

They offer a medium for businesses from all over to advertise in. It's called adwords.

They did not create their main index to service the business community. Quite the opposite as a factor of fact. It just turned out to be a great asset for a business to have.

Do they owe Canadians anything, no! Do they owe US sites anything, no! Do they Russian sites anything, no! Why should the Canadians be any different.

It boils down to if you don't like it, don't support it by using it.

Last time I checked, it was equally as hard to get a US based site into the Canadian version of Google. I don't here anybody crying about that!

[Marcia]

Sorry, but we just can't get into international politics; it's too complex an issue.

I can only suggest checking further into the matter through the appropriate informational resources, and realizing that geo-targeting is also a complex topic, as is the fact that *any* search engine has discretionary privilege with regard to delivering results based on their particular flavor of demographic data.