Google Romania and its Usability

Where do the Google Romania results come from?

[sovidiu]

Hello. I do not know how many people are interested in this topic, since I only one other Romanian visiting the WebmasterWorld forums and, as expected, both of us are in the "free zone", since Romanian credit cards are not international/Paypal does not provide services to my country. Anyway, I would like one or more advised members to offer information about the datacenters that provide Google Romania with results. We said "datacenters" because each night around 12 a.m. the Romanian Google SERPs change and it all looks like a juggle between URLs. We have acquired first place for terms or syntagms from the daily Romanian vocabulary, using the old "W3C-compliant" standards and manual addition to directories/search engines with free indexing services. Could anyone clear this out? And by the way, Google translated into Romanian should be using UTF-8 characters and proper Romanian words, which it does not. And changing the translations made by others via Google Accounts are left unchanged.

[ThomasB]

the results can come from another DC every time you send a query.

As just mentioned in another thread [webmasterworld.com...] there's still space for improvements at Google. But as every commerically thinking company they have to outweigth the use for Google (cost/income based) and the usage improvement for users. And maybe Romania isn't one of their main targets.

[sovidiu]

If Romania was not a commercial target, they would have not launched Google.ro :)

[DoppyNL]

Search results can change constantly, mostly when you get directed to a different datacenter. Wouldn't worry about it.

If Romania was not a commercial target, they would have not launched Google.ro

I think there aren't many tld's where google.tld isn't owned by the search engine giant!

[sweet_ali]

You are not the only Romanian.

[sovidiu]

Was starting to think I am the only one from Romania here. Now there are four of us on WebmasterWorld.

[gethan]

Can't help with the "where the data comes from". But Romania along with many other Eastern European countries is becoming richer. 2007 projected entry into the EU. Why would google or any other forward looking web based company ignore it? At such a small cost today internationalizing a site - it could reap huge rewards in terms of brand recognition in the future.

Slowly I'm UTF-8'ing my sites and translating where appropriate. Google has it easy, not much content.

Ps. Greetings from Hungary btw.

[sovidiu]

Hello, Gethan. You have a good point in your post about Google providing new facilities for people in the Eastern Europe. Besides, Google Romania also has links to Google in Magyar or Deutsch, which is appropriate for someone located outside these countries. I can't figure out why no Romanian web page would go over PR 7, but I suppose it has something to do with Google being located in the US of A, not Europe.

[atlrus]

Honestly, I agree that Google.ro is not owned by the search engine Google - and even if it was - it's nothing but translated results from the .com. And I don't see why would Google care about Eastern European countries when it can't straighten the mess in it's own yard. And with country-specific languages like Romanian, Bulgarian, etc. and the fact that it would take years and years for those countires to amount to anything on the internet market - it's just senseless for Google to bother paying more attention to the SERs east of Poland.
Anyhow, the "search engine market" in those countries is practically dominated by local directories, so free or paid listings on those would be much more successfull than Google.ro or similar.

[gethan]

Google has advertised for Hungarian speakers for there adwords campaign - probably to review ad's which I see in Magyar - on both Adsense and on the SE. There is money to be made in Eastern Europe, where Hungary is now - Romania has every chance of being in 3 years time.

altrus: The cost for Google to internationalize the search engine is very low (relatively). The rewards will be in the future.

I would echo that the results look to me to be the same as from any other google engine. I used a Romanian place name, same results.

They will use the same techniques to provide google.ro with results as google.co.uk or google.com.sg

Usability.

sovidiu: Are you sure that it's google with the non-UTF8 characters? not the websites - a kind of Hunglish is common on the web in Hungary ... from when only US keyboards were common.

[sovidiu]

Google Romania is UTF-8 compliant. However, the search options converted into Romanian are a bit confusing.