Google Search Corresponds to User Location, Not Domain

In another one of the many changes that Google has brought to the table in recent weeks and months, a new change means that Google searches are altogether changed from what they once were. Google summed up the latest change via their webmaster blog as searches now correspond to user location and not domain:

So if you live in Australia, you’ll automatically receive the country service for Australia, but when you travel to New Zealand, your results will switch automatically to the country service for New Zealand. Upon return to Australia, you will seamlessly revert back to the Australian country service.

That is quite a useful little adjustment. It’s a big change to how we do searches on our mobile devices, our desktop devices and even Google Maps. In fact, according to Google, 1 in 5 searches are now going to be concentrating on a location-related question and answer instead of anything else.

Naturally, that should make it a fair bit easier to see why so many are turning to using this kind of search. It’s a powerful feature and is likely to make quite a difference to the kind of searches that we once do. Currently, you don’t need to change to .com, co.uk, .jp etc. to get the answers based on the nation that you are looking at.

Now, the user location is going to be chosen based on where the search is coming from or where is the searcher’s actual physical location. It will naturally make it a bit tougher for you to get a search going in another nation.

On a mobile device, you can easily just go to the settings and change your location search from within there. This search can be found under ‘Region for Search Results’ and will make it easy for you to begin to scour other parts of the world still without having to do anything else.

If you are online looking at advice for, say, your taxes, you are less likely to be reading a guidance plan for another nation – many people find themselves as experts on US taxation as they would do all their searches on US Google.

You can easily just adjust to make sure that as many searches as you want are carried out in the kind of manner that you wish. The days of being able to just change the URL are gone, yes, but this is altogether more relevant for users to give them a better user experience.

Source: Google Webmaster Blog