How well does Google.im perform?
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.
Comments
re: How well does Google.im perform?
Interesting post DanI've been wondering if having an .im domain name has any kind of negative effect on google's search rankings against .co.uk domain names. Any ideas?
re: How well does Google.im perform?
Jim, I think that if you're using the google.co.uk search then it will probably give preference to .uk domains and/or things hosted in the UK. Whether hosting in the Isle of Man or .im domains count as being part of the UK (at least geographically) for that purpose, I'm not sure. It'd be interesting to test out though.I suspect most .im domains wouldn't rank as well as the more established sites on .co.uk domains for common search terms, but that would mostly be down to the relative newness of the .im sites/domains.Not sure if that answers your question :)