Google appears to have the capability to georeference their index by country and possibly with even finer geographic granularity. I noticed that they are now redirecting users to country specific versions of their web page which appears to be done through the various IP address to location tools. Given that Google *seems to know* where the user is, and where the web pages are, perhaps they are now including geographic relevance in the search engine relevancy metrics. Or maybe not! These are only my observations. (I've also noticed that I have had more connection errors recently in initially connecting to the google site and this coincidently started about the time that we began being automatically redirected from the www.google.com to www.google.ca) -Randy -----Original Message----- From: Steve Goldstein [mailto:sgoldste@nsf.gov] Sent: April 26, 2002 12:52 PM To: Avleen Vig Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Google doing regional preferencing on results? **If** they cache and replicate, it could be that the caches are not always identical in different places. If they are replicated, perhaps a replication cycle lagged in one of the two locations. --Steve At 5:36 PM +0100 4/26/02, Avleen Vig wrote:

it gives you different results depending on where in the world you search from.