Google – oversmart?

Google shows search results from India even when the radio button for “the web” is selected. Either it should show the real results or when it tries to be “helpful” it should change the selected radio button to “pages from India”.

3 Comments on “Google – oversmart?

  1. What was the URL, is it : http://www.google.co.in OR http://www.google.com ; in any case .COM with redirected to .CO.IN. Fundamentally ‘search the web option’ will provide results depending on from which location you are searching for “PUB”. It will include local + Global.
    Search pages from India will provide pages only from India NO other location.

    Is there any other business rule?

    Regards,
    Kamlesh

  2. kamlesh, the point here is for some keywords like, pub, hotel, etc.. both the results, web and india give almost same results. Then the whole point of the radio button comes into question. And how much overlap there is, is also random.

    also another point comes into picture. radio buttons are used mostly where the choices are exclusive. say you can have a radio button to choose between male and female. email or phone number. But here one of the choices is a subset of the other. pages from india is a subset of the web.
    the business rule I mentioned was what you said yourself. In the first case (web) it is automatically detecting your location and giving results. Say you are surfing from delhi, it detects delhi and shows addresses of pubs near delhi. So even if you select pages from india you are not narrowing your search in a way, you are going up the geography scale. (india is vaster than delhi).

  3. Google detects your location by your server’s location and this is tricky! When I connect to my office VPN server which is in Japan, even though I type google.com I get google.co.jp by default. Also the language settings are changed accordingly (in this case the results are shown in Japanese).

    I tried searching for “Pub” on this .jp site and its showing me results from Japan even though I haven’t selected “Pages from Japan” radio button. So looks like their business rule is not entirely matching with their interface elements.

    For Japanese(or any country specific search results) site, I feel google could rename these to read:
    – the web (including Japan)
    – Pages from Japan Only

    Regards,
    Sandeep

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