So there’s been a lot of talk about .com domains appearing in Google UK results over on Matt Cutts’ blog recently. Personally I’ve definitely noticed some very poor results from Google UK over the last few months, quite often seeing .au, .nz, .ca, quite a lot of irrelevant results from Indian .org and .com domains, and even .gov.jm (Jamaican) results.
Something seems to be scarily wrong with Google’s local algorithms, at least for the UK – Matt’s assurances that this is a .com boost or an unrelated experiment simply don’t wash as far as I can see. So much so that even Google reports a problem with Google UK…
The chart below shows Google Trends search data from searches originating in the UK, for searches including the keyword [uk]. This is commonly appended to searches when users don’t find what they’re looking for on the first try – for example [car rental uk]. People may even do this more often than clicking the “results from the UK” radio button.
It seems pretty clear that at some point in late March, something happened that caused searches including the term ‘uk’ to rise sharply, and this is backed up by the more detailed data at Google Insights. Not having noticed much jingoism in the last 6 months or so, I can’t think of much else that might have caused this – especially since seaches have been declining steeply for the past 5 years.
So is Google’s own data revealing a flaw in their algorithm or what?
6 Responses to Even Google says Google UK sucks
Dave September 30, 2009
Really clever spot, it’s interesting to see evidence that it’s happening on a much larger scale than I think a lot of us expected.
Rishil September 30, 2009
#ukserps Get your twibbons, seriously
Richard Vaughan September 30, 2009
Lateral thinking man nice spot. The UK serps are officially broken, users are telling us so!
Robert Nicholson September 30, 2009
Really good research. I wonder if Google is aware of this? I presume their internal search quality & research teams would. If not… is google getting so big & corporate that the teams are unaware of effects they’re having and are teams not researching user behaviour enough?
rob September 30, 2009
Yeah it’s totally crazy – we’ve had to put up with some pretty terrible results for around 6 months now. I seem to be getting bad results for at least 1 in 10 searches in Google UK now.
Funnily enough seems to mostly happen on non-commercial search terms in my experience…
Robert September 30, 2009
Nothing new really… but then again I’m in South Africa. Our results are mostly American. I guess Google reckons if it doesn’t quite get it, just return a US result. Pity really as they were the best local search provider – now they all suck. Or wait… bing.co.za here I come!