Google and site locations

[willtell]

Does anyone know if Google will become better at location based searches. I notice that when I search for specific locations, there is usually non-location based sites either ahead or mixed in with the location based ones.

I would think that if there are location specific based sites that they would come before all non-specific.

For instance, if I want a hotel in a city, should I get the your.hotel.com site before city.hotel.com sites?

[Brett_Tabke]

There are so many factors that could go into determining a sites "location" that basing too much on domain name would be risky. I think the physical location of the server comes first. Then would be what directory category entries it has.

[shelleycat]

>I think the physical location of the server comes first.

Even this can be dodgy. I own a .co.nz domain name and my site is hosted with a local New Zealand owned and operated company. The words "New Zealand" are on pretty much all my pages. Yet the server it is hosted on is physically located somewhere in the US.

So as far as I can tell anyone reading my pages pretty much has to take my word for it that I'm located in New Zealand.

[heini]

Yes Google goes for location of server first, which given the bvery nature of the www is highly absurd.

Examples? Canadian hosted sites targeting the US, US hosted sites targeting UK, austrian hosted sites with .de extensions etc etc.

The only reasonable factors for determination of laocalization of sites are ccTLDs and language.