Google appear to have rolled out an update to Google.co.uk before it was ready. According to Matt Cutts the update is an attempt to integrate .com results into the searches into results for the option ‘the web’. However, it seems to have brought free reign so that a huge number of international domains are appearing in the SERPs.

Try searching ‘motor forum’ and you will see what people mean when they are saying that the results are broken.

The problem behind this experimentation by Google is that they have never fully defined the options ‘the web’ and ‘pages from the UK (or any other country)’ options properly – the results are usually much the same in both options, with .co.uk domains generally enjoying a slight preference in ‘the web’. Many pages of multi-national interest are .com so Google have decided to even things up a bit to fulfil their ‘expectation’ criteria.

I should take a minute to explain this a bit – Google aim to return the result that most users expect to find. So if they search for ‘Barack Obama’ in a search that covers the web, they probably expect to find a biography page about Barack Obama, possibly on the Whitehouse website or on Wikipedia.

However this seemed to be working perfectly fine before - .com results were showing up in the expected places. In my opinion, anyway. Now my expectations are being dashed in quite a few searches.

I search ‘blinds’ expecting to see a raft of companies selling blinds. Now I see there’s a Telegraph article about Dragons’ Den and an American software company selling something called ‘window blinds’, presumably for Microsoft Windows.

Hopefully they’ll stop experimenting and my expectations will be restored – including the expectation that Google don’t mess up.

Posted In:

Google