February 13th 2018

Google now ignores domain in search results

Google has changed their search to ignore which Google domain you search from. So Google.fr and Google.co.uk, for example, no longer search for results in France and the UK. Results now rely entirely on the location of the person who is searching. So if you are in London and search for Pizza, you will always see results from London, even if you used say Google.de for German results. Unfortunately this change does mean that our existing options for search engine results no longer work as you might expect: Currently you ask for results by Google website, e.g. "Google Denmark". Because of this change, all results for different countries act as if they were made in the US, where our servers are based. We've working on a new version of the search ranking test that will allow you to specify what physical locations you want to search from instead. So instead of specifying a Google website, we expect you will specify a location, like "Paris" or "California". This is a substantial change and requires that we rebuild much of our search technology from scratch. We don't have a guaranteed timeframe yet but we are hoping this will be live by the end of February 2018. We'll post an update on this website when we know more.

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