Quote:
Originally Posted by Orion
if you enter say ronboyd into your browser address bar that order still holds today.. it will bring up .com first etc... after .org it will go to YOUR country code. eg. for me here it will bring up .ca.
You should also find that if you are in UK that you will get more .co.uk results, japan .co.jp, austraila .com.au, canada .ca etc. This (I believe) is a newer feature as the search engines are trying to privide more and more localized searches for businesses on the web. Mostly a good thing I know it's always been frustrating for myself when I'm searching for something local and getting tons of results from other countries.
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About 18 months ago we did an experiment to to get an idea of how much Google were skewing results based on geographical / local factors.
We set up a clean machine with windows configured throughout as a US machine, and connected through a US based ISP and ran some search tests.
Wasn't a very scientific test but it proved to us that Google at least pre-filters results based on geographical location. Searching on .com through the "US" machine showed distinctly US oriented results, and .com from a UK setup machine strongly UK based - and also not much different from searching on google.co.uk.
So my view is if your market is local / national, the national domain suffix is not likely to hinder performance. Don't think it helps particularly, as I also find in practice .com ranks just as well.
Quite what mechanism Google uses to determine the location of a site I wouldn't like to say for certain, but server location, and site content (addresses etc) I suspect all play a part.