Google "Search by Location"

[Slud]

Check it:
[labs.google.com ]

[Ove]

Iam really confused now, i live in Sweden and in these days you can choose search www, search english sites and sites from sweden.

When i have a website i x diffrent languages and do a search for sites in swedish, the english is showing up, the first thing i think of is that the english site is hosted in sweden, and i wondering is google going to filter where the site is hosted? hope not i can understand if they filter for tld and language but please say that you would not filter by local hosting ;-)

Thats surprise me alot is when i do a search for english pages for the same search term the swedish site is in number 1 for that search, maybe this is just a glitch. How is it in the other countries like Denmark, Germany and the other europeean languages?

/Ove

[heini]

From what I see, and also according to a statement from GG, it's TLD and/or IP. It has been like that for a while.

[Josefu]

...I don't think anyone will be automatically 'filtering' anything - it should be for the user to decide, non? It will probably end up being another setting in the preferences, much like the 'choice of languages' settings IMHO : )

...and the 'google search command - an additon like "site:.fr" (looking something like "loc:944465") or a separate text entry field? I vote for the latter - left blank 'normal' (no location) results are returned... like the page in the lab : )

[HitProf]

Isn't IP hosting location?

I'm not experiencing the same problem Ove has, but on multi language sites the description of the English homepage may show up. The page looks like being English then.

Google should get rid of geo-targeting by IP: hosting in the US is a lot cheaper for sites from every country and sites shouldn't be punished for this in local searches.

Cheers,
HitProf

[heini]

To further qualify:
the search option in local Google sites under which users search for results from a country filters for IP and TLD.
You are in if you have:
local IP plus gTLD (com, net, org, info, biz)
local domain, regardless of IP

Language choice is not involved.

[HitProf]

>Language choice is not involved

That's what I find funny.

A site can be fully targeted to a specific country and written in the local language and still have gTLD like .com or .info. Things like language and company address should matter more then host ISP as most site owners dont have a clue about where their ISP hosts their domain.

[g1smd]

Does the Content-Language meta tag have any influence at all?

How about the Content-Type (i.e. Character Set) meta tag too?

[heini]

>meta tag

Lets not get confused here, what we are talking about is the search option in local Google sites, where you can restrict searches to results from a country, as opposed to the option, where you restrict to language.
For the language restricted searches meta tags certainly don't hurt, though all major engines use automatic language detection.

[Josefu]

...I really think cross-referencing will be the future for this sort of search. Google will find a list of sites pertaining to the location entered in one window, a list (or a 'search within the results) of the keywords entered in the second window, and I think your language preferences will dictate if there will be any language filtering. Still pretty simple, non?

I still like the idea of a Geo meta-tag indicating site location : )