Google comes good
If you’ve been here earlier in the week, you might have read our bemoaning some awful results cropping in the “pages from the UK” search on Google. Well, it seems that the deluge of complaints from people like us has filtered through to the guys there and normal service should be resumed soon.
A brief pause for a heartfelt ’phew’…
Matt Cutts - a blogger who works for Google answers the question in his latest update. If you don’t have the wherewithal to trawl through the techy stuff, here’s what he had to say:
“An SEO or two has been holding my feet to the fire about root pages of .com’s that are hosted outside the US. In some (pretty rare) circumstances, you’ll see the root page when you search site:domain.com on google.co.uk for the “search the web” option but you won’t see the root page when you switch to “search pages from the UK”. I thought we’d nailed this issue in December, but we found another way that this can happen. I believe a fix has been submitted and is percolating its way through the system.”
If that’s still all Greek to you - it means that you should see better results for the “pages from the UK” option in the next week or so.
Today’s Moral?
Google might be a massive company - but they know the value of listening to what their customers are telling them. Although it has taken more time than we would have liked (understandable given the complexity of what they do) they took what we said in board and acted on it. A lesson we could all do with heeding.
18 Responses to “Google comes good”
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I’m having a different problem with Pages from the UK. Most, though not all of the time, clicking on the Pages from the UK does not register and I’m obliged to search the whole web when I’m not interested in sites outside the UK. It become so unusual to be able to limit my search to the UK that I now rarely try to do so. Is that what Google is trying to achieve? For the record I’m using Google in conjunction with Vista Ultimate (which is proving extremely stable).
Danny Lawrence says:
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Hi Danny I’m beginning to suspect that Google might be hedging towards turning off the ’pages from the UK’ option. If you’re using Google.co.uk you’d expect to see pages from the UK by default anyway. To my mind, it would make more sense to have a ’pages from the World’ option, which would show you Google.com’s main search results and probably make the results more relevant anyway. Given the problems that Google are evidently having in maintaining this feature I think you’re probably right in that it is becoming more of a problem than a benefit. Still - who’s to say? They’re the ones with all the brains!
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Hi Danny, Do you mean, when you actually try to click the “pages from the UK” radio button that it doesn’t work? If so, then I’ve had this problem too. I try to click it and nothing happens! Very odd to see a bug like this on Google. Unfortunatley I can’t offer any explantion or help with this. Suggest you use the feedback link at Google to ask them to fix it.
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I was puzzled for a short while over the buttons inability to highlight. But not for long :). Try clicking around the button as that seems to highlight it.
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Why is there no ’preference’ setting to make the radio button default to Pages from the UK when using google.co.uk? I am constantly annoyed at having to take this additional step when searching. I wish to search the whole web less than 1% of the time.
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It constantly surprises us that Google’s enormous spending in terms of usability hasn’t addressed this issue. A simple cookie that made a note of your preferences over a couple of dozen searches and saved the setting accordingly would be all they needed to do. If you have a Google account, you *might* find that you can save your preference, but without having tried it myself I couldn’t say for sure.
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Hi, I recently viewed this discussion, along with many errors, in search of a way to set UK results as default. Through my recent study of web design, I stumbled across a solution! Here goes: 1. Go go google.co.uk. 2. Click the ’pages from UK’ radio button. 3. Click ’Search’ but leave the search box *empty*. 4. Use the new address wherever you like! I now have google.co.uk as my homepage, with UK results as default. Result If you don’t want to go to that effort, here’s what you need to bookmark or set your homepage to: http://www.google.co.uk/webhp?hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&cr=countryUK%7CcountryGB This also includes the preference setting for the image search filter, so if my setting isn’t to your taste, you’ll need to set your preferences and create the URL yourself. Hope this helps someone, Jamie.
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Well, that didn’t work as planned.. you’ll have to do it yourself anyway. Can’t say I didn’t try
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Hi Jamie A great - and simple - way around the whole thing for people who want to do this… I don’t know why you thought it didn’t work as you planned - looked spot on to me! Cheers
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Re: it not working… The URL I posted overflows the message area in Firefox, but shows completely in Internet Explorer. Nothing serious! Glad I could help.
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Thanks Jamie. A good fix to something that has been bugging me too for a long time!
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Brilliant ! thanks Jamie
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Excellent fix to a very annoying problem. Google - why haven’t you fixed this yet? I am fed up of seeing useless USA sites by default.
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Its the little things in life that make a difference and this has been bugging me for ages. Cheers for the fix!
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This problem affects me differently. My search keeps defaulting to useless UK sites by default. Have to take a secondary step of clicking the hyperlink to google.com each time I reopen. After much searching to fix the issue have given up & changed to Yahoo for seaches.
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Jamie - brilliantly diabolical for making me feel like Homer Simpson.
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Doesn’t work for me. Using that address doesn’t default to pages from uk. Grrrrrr.
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Works brill - VMT - has been a long term bug as I invariably only search for UK data
