Worst UK Serps yet? 6
Posted on
January 05, 2010 by
Malcolm Coles
If buying a used car, I wonder what checks you should do on the documentation? Don't bother asking Google. My search for used car document check threw up sites, in order, on the first page from:
- UK
- India
- USA
- Ireland
- USA
- India
- USA
- Brazil
- UK
How is this possibly useful? All Indian, or all Brazilian or all American, I could understand. But advice from a mixture of countries on something as local as vehicle documentation? It's like the league of nations. A new low in the broken UK search results ...
The UK Serps never cease to amaze me. Surely they should know after all this time that when you search for something as specific as "used car document check" that you are looking for results in your country.
Thankfully, appending UK to the end of that query clears it up but how many people would search like that?
Perhaps they are trying to force a change in search methods on its users to solve the problem as there are more and more instances of this solution having to be done to clean up the SERPs.
How is that broken? You got results from the WORLD WIDE web. If you clicked "pages from the UK" then all the results are from the UK. Simples.
Mike: But the search was done in google.co.uk. The geo location of the search is assumed isn't it?
Mike: what Richard said. Who, anywhere in the world, would want information on vehicle documentation from a range of countries?
Google should either stick to serving results from the country that's most appropriate for the search term (EG the country where it is most used as a search term) OR work out where I am and serve up local results.
Serving up a hodge podge of results from around the world is of no use to anyone - it guarantees a second search will have to be done. The two other options I just gave would at least satisfy some people.
I bet it makes people click on the Sponsored listings though, don't you?
Sorry, I'm with Mike on this one. You want UK results - select the 'pages from the UK' option - that's what it's there for.
How is Google meant to know that you don't want to compare 'used car document checks' around the world? Or do you think you should go to the local version of Google every time you want to search for something. So, going to China on holiday and want to look for a hotel - go to Google.cn - hmmm, except that's in Chinese!
Surely the simple answer is to set the UK option as your default - then you'll get UK biased results - otherwise, why bother having that option at all?