Google

It seems Google is getting a few things wrong in their regional results, i blogged about them getting it wrong a few days ago. Now my colleagues at Freshegg are trying to get to the bottom of this.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Google, has quickly become the world’s most popular search tool. Hitwise UK tells us that, in October 2008, 75.11% of UK searches used Google.co.uk, 14.33% used Google.com, 2.86% used UK.Search.Yahoo.com and 2.16% used www.uk.ask.com. Clearly Google is currently the big boy in the UK search market.

But can you really trust the search results that Google provides? And how can a user verify that the search results provided by Google are accurate?

For businesses trading or promoting their services online Google is an important element in the chain that connects them with their prospective customers. If Google isn’t presenting a business in their search results then that business will not get any traffic from Google.

I’ve recently become aware of major differences between the Google.com search results and the localised Google.co.uk results. On investigation I’ve come across numerous reports from others who have seen similar, strange results.

In my case I came across a UK based business that is ranking very well in Google.com for a range of search terms, many including specific UK city and town names. However, entering the same search terms into Google.co.uk the results were far less favourable with a page that appeared at #6 in results from Google.com appearing at around #400 in the results from Google.co.uk. I tried this comparison with a number of UK-city-specific terms and observed similar results for a variety of landing pages in this site.

Initially I thought that there must be something wrong with the site or its hosting so I did a little investigation and found that the server is based in the UK, the site has been labelled as being in the UK in Google webmaster tools and they have a UK business address registered with Google maps.

I also conducted similar searches using the same queries entered into Yahoo. The results were the opposite of those received from Google with Yahoo UK ranking the various landing pages more highly than Yahoo global. So it would appear that Yahoo has correctly detected that the site is a UK based business with a market in the UK and would therefore be of interest to those searching from the UK. Google, however, appears to be under the impression that the site is focussed somewhere other than the UK (U.S.) even with the additional information provided via webmaster tools and Google maps.

So Google is getting it wrong, badly. If Google.co.uk were an employee or a consultant and they were found to have returned such inaccurate and misleading results they would potentially be sacked.

For businesses the implications of Google’s apparent inability to accurately determine the geographic location of their market (even when stated explicitly) is worrying. When investigating this issue I’ve come across similar reports from other businesses. In one case a business disappeared completely from the Google UK results, retained good positions in Google.com and somehow went to number 1 in the Google Russia results. Others have reported massive fluctuations in their Google.co.uk search results.

It would appear that there are currently some significant and worrying failings in the quality of the results delivered by Google.co.uk and I, for one, have very little trust for the results that are currently being provided.

The search term in question for anyone who would like to try and figure this out is “airport parking” and gosimply is the site in question

Try searching Google for “fast food“. Ive been doing some research on global brands and how there using SEO(more on this soon).

One thing i have noticed is how Google favors the big global brands. Why would Mcdonalds need to spend a penny on SEO when google is doing it for them? The term fast food might not exactly be ground breaking but it still brings in 135,000 searches a month according to adwords.

For the term “fast food” or “fast foods” Mcdonalds doesn’t actually rank well, but with Google on your side you can save thousands on PPC and brand awareness, i wonder what KFC or Burger King think about this?

Want to know if theres a dose of flu on the way? Ask Google!

Saw this today on Google.org, it shows the trends of searches for flu and flu related keyterms to estimate flu activity in your area quicker than most other more traditional methods.

Are Google really taking over the world? I think the theory behind this could be used in alot of other areas as we have seen with the recent American elections.

Try doing this search http://www.google.com/search?q=earth4energy although hopefully google will resolve the issue ASAP, Google adwords accounts or credit cards seem to be getting hacked and then using .cn domain to setup a temporary landing page to forward through a clickbank hop link.

Here’s the image i took at 22.30gmt

Ive heard about this a few times but never actually seen it live so to speak, hopefully Google will sort this out but will this mean for verification for webmasters.