Nordic eMarketing recently conducted a series of tests of Google’s regional European performance. By conducting simple searches in Spain, Germany, and Iceland, we found that the top ten results varied in each country by as much as 40%.
Total search results varied from 86,000 to 130,000 results for the same keywords. All of these major search engines use one or all of the following options when conducting a regional search:
1. Search the entire Web
2. Focus on pages written in the language of the request
3. Use only pages hosted in the country of the request
Google, Ask, and MSN seemed to do the best job of discerning which pages were most relevant based on these criteria, while Yahoo had trouble recognizing from which country a site was hosted.
Kristjan Mar Hauksson
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[…] How Well Do Google, Ask, MSN, and Yahoo Perform Regional Searches?Multilingual Search, UK – Dec 4, 2006… Google, Ask, and MSN seemed to do the best job of discerning which pages were most relevant based on these criteria, while Yahoo had trouble recognizing from … […]
From sites we manage in the UK, Google is the largest referring search engine with the co.uk version leading the trail with nearly 70% of Google referrals. And when looking if people use “the web” or “pages from the UK” when they searched nearly 70% of those that use Google.co.uk used “pages from the UK” on the average.
Does anyone have figures for the different usage of these three options:
1. Search the entire Web
2. Focus on pages written in the language of the request
3. Use only pages hosted in the country of the request
On the regional versions of the search engines. How do people search when using the regional versions of their search engine, 1, 2 or 3?