Google.Your-Country-Here

Depending on who you ask, what statistics they’re looking at, etc., Google currently holds somewhere between 66 and 89 percent of the market share on global search engine use. With country-level domains for over 160 different countries throughout the world, and at least eleven nation-specific sites for each inhabited continent*, this is not hard to believe.

Twenty-five of the top thirty most-used search engines in the world are Google variations. The vast majority of search engine usage goes through Google.com, but even Google.ru (Google Russia), at number 21 on the list, gets about 1% of world search engine traffic.**

While using Google.fr instead of Google.com may be the obvious choice for those who live in France, for example, visitors, travelers, and non-natives of the nation delineated in the dot-suffix may not know what variances to expect when using a different country-specific Google.

If you’re traveling in France, for example, you’ll find that typing “Google” in the address bar of your laptop or mobile device will take you to Google.fr (Google France). (If you have Google in your favorites and access it that way, however, you’ll arrive at your personal default Google.) Google France is in French, obviously, but searches in other languages will yield language-specific results. You won’t be redirected to your language’s default Google, but you will receive, for example, English-language results through Google.fr.

However, if the words themselves in your search are similar in both languages, you’ll get results in French (in this case). An English-language search for “nice hotel” on Google.com pulls up wildly different matches than the same search will on Google.fr, because “Nice” is a city in France, and doesn’t exist as an adjective like it does in English. Be aware of these similarity-induced peculiarities when searching, or you may only find lodging in Nice, even if you’re in Paris, and said lodging might not be that nice.

If, for example, you are in France, you can use Google.com (or whatever your preferred, country-specific Google is) to find information on France—such as nice hotels, or hotels in Nice. But, using Google.fr will give you better “local” results, which are almost always better than less localized results. And, Google has long excelled at “localizing” searches to give the best possible results—my job and my home are only about eleven miles apart, but a Google search made at one location gives me much different results than the exact same search made at the other.

It’s important to note that, because of said localizing, a country-coded dot-suffix for your website can substantially improve your rankings in Google searches originating from those respective countries. If you get a significant amount of business from Australia, for example, or you would like to, it can be helpful to create a mirror site with a .au suffix (such as www.forexample.com.au). This country-specific dot-suffix will boost your rankings in other search engines, as well. You may want to keep your site entirely the same, with the .suffix as the only change, or you may need to rethink your keywords, SEO strategies, etc., to help your site deliver the best possible experience for visitors from other countries.

* And Google.antarctica is probably in the works.
** Again, depending on who you ask, the available stats, etc.