Posted 28th May 2008
Watching a video today about Google's localisation of their search results (part of "A peek into our search factory"), I spotted the Manx flag and thought I'd give Google's Isle of Man localised search (www.google.im) a test run and see how it performs at disambiguating queries and giving preference to local search results.
|
Topic |
Google Isle of Man |
Google UK |
|---|---|---|
Places |
||
|
✓ all relevant |
✓ all relevant |
|
|
✓ top 2 relevant, rest contain Irish, Scottish and Manx results |
✓ top 2 relevant, rest contain Scottish and Manx results |
|
|
X no relevant results (mostly US) |
X no relevant results (UK/US mixture) |
|
|
X no relevant results |
✓ top 2 relevant |
|
|
X no relevant results |
✓ 2 of top 3 results relevant |
|
|
X no relevant results |
X no relevant results |
|
Sport |
||
|
X no relevant results |
X no relevant results |
|
|
X no relevant results |
X no relevant results |
|
|
X no relevant results |
X no relevant results |
|
|
X no relevant results |
X no relevant results |
|
I think that's enough testing to realise that the Google Isle of Man tailored service isn't Isle of Man tailored at all. Even the Google UK service is better.
It's great that they have a service aimed at users from the Isle of Man, and I'd love to see it succeed, but I don't understand why they have it out there at the moment if it's not actually tailoring the search results to be useful to the Manx market.