[quote="cbp"]
Quote:
The location of the server has everything to do with it. It is by far the most powerful influence in determining pages from <region>. Just becasue a host is based in Australia does not mean the server is based here. I use 3 Australian hosts - one of them is just a resller for a USA company (server based there).
In 100's of eg's that I have investigated, the sites only show in Google's regional searches if they are hosted in the region, regardless of the domain extension (keeping in mind that the actual server may not be in the country of the host company) - of those 100's, there have only been no more than a few eg's in which this was not the case (Minstrel's eg in another thread is one of these eg's).
CBP
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I understand what you are driving at but I can quote 100s of examples to the contrary. All our sites are hosted outside Australia but they score well quite often in "pages from Australia" searches on google.com.au
But in any event why does it matter where a site is physically hosted? I mean for a start it is possible to delegate a domain to several servers in several countries - which you might well do if the site was mission critical.
Also it defies logic that Google would spend a great deal of time, money and resources on doing look ups on server IPs which in any event would produce a high percentage of errors.
Further it could be construed as a restraint of trade under the Australian Trade Practices Act (which Google are subject to as they trade here) to exclude a business from a search simply because of the location of the server. There are many argunments as to why this would be so not the least of which is that Australian businesses should not be forced to use substandard, sloooow, and expensive Australian based hosting when cheaper and demonstrably better hosting is available(IANAL).
"Local search tools for local people" being pushed by some people is about as whacky as the League of Gentlemen. It defies the logic of the internet. If I go onto the internet to look for an expresso machine I don't really care if the supplier is in the next suburb or Penang or Timbuctoo. If I suspect that I need a supplier in my city or region I might put in a further search parameter in my search but that should be a decision I make. "Localising" along the lines that the Yellow Pages attempts to do and others are suggesting is the way of the future in search suddenly cuts out a lot of results that may be pertinent to me but are excluded by an arbitrary decision made by a machine about what is "local".
It should also be noted that most of the country specific SE projects that appeared '96 - '99 seem to have withered on the vine (I am not saying this is a good thing).