Changes in Google’s UK Search Results: Not Good
It’s been a few weeks since Google started tweaking the UK search results, and a number of folk have been asking me about the changes and why they are taking place.
Matt Cutts, over at Google, has produced a useful video (see bottom of this posting) explaining that not all UK content is hosted on a .co.uk domain name. I think most Brits would have to agree with that assumption. And as a result, Google appears to be placing less emphasis on the top level .co.uk domains and introducing other content appropriate to the UK audience coming from other top level domains such as .com
So far so good, and I’d have to agree with the underlying assumptions.
However, it just doesn’t seem to be working well. And I can’t prove it, but it seems an awful lot worse at the moment.
I have two examples for you.
I wanted to get my hair cut in the neighbouring village of Bingham, Nottinghamshire and couldn’t remember the hairdressers name, so just used Google.co.uk to find a hairdresser in Bingham.
Google gave me as the top result the charming Trisha….. a hairdresser in Las Vegas. I’m not sure I would gamble on a haircut in Vegas.
And I suspect Trisha will be well confused if she looks at her web metrics and sees gaggles of visitors coming to her site from England.
Taking another practical example, I was demonstrating how Google localises the results based on your IP address, and did my neato-keen trick of searching for a generic phrase like Accountant.
A beautiful map of Rotherham appears, and I did the usual explanation of inaccuracy of British IP addresses and their impact on the Google results. I’m actually in Nottingham, but Rotherham is sort of nearby, so it is kind of accurate. Well not really, but I digress.
But then I was aghast to see within the top ten results for my “accountant” search was the US Department of Labor Statistics website and not a British statistic to be seen.
Surely the word “labor” as opposed to “labour” might have some bearing on the results?
There is a single occurrence of the word “British” on the high ranking page (”British Institute of Certified Public Accountants”) but surely this should have been outweighed by the bulk of other American references?
Or a Washington Zip Code rather than a postcode, or the US telephone dialling code?
Surely the fact that a US government department will have relatively inbound links from UK sites will matter?
Now the issues as I see them are this:
1. This intermingling of inappropriate American content in the search results is not something new. Google appears to have been testing this for a while, and I have been reading about these changes in the results since at least June.
2. Whilst I accept that a .co.uk top level domain name is not the single most important indicator of sites suitable for British tastes, I can’t understand what other signals are being used to deliver the best UK search experience.
3. Matt has indicated that there are no plans to change the current strategy of placing less importance on the top level .co.uk domain name. I’d like to encourage some feedback from UK users to say that Google is not giving the kind of search experience we expect. Matt Cutts is inviting feedback, and can I suggest we work on getting some appropriate examples to share with the team.
September 10th, 2009 at 8:15 am
I’d just like to say that, since reading this, I’ve made the decision to use Bing as my defult search engine. I use Google for everything – no Yellow Pages, no 118 numbers etc. And, 99% of the time, I’m looking for something local. I think this is awful and I am more than prepared to give Bing a chance now. Maybe they’ll prove to be better than Google – who appears to be getting a little big for its boots.
September 11th, 2009 at 9:10 am
From a search point of view, I agree with Siobhan, I have started to use Bing a lot more.
However from a business angle Google still has the majority of market share. If the people are using Google to find your site then this is going to have a negative impact on traffic.
If people do start getting a results that are meaningless to them as in Susans example above I wonder just how much of that market share may be given over to Bing.
October 16th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Susan, in most cases when I’m looking for UK only services I just switch to pages from the UK and it seems to do the trick.
We are a .com and we want business from around the world and the UK, so it doesn’t limit us being a .com at all.