localized Google

[^rooker]

For some time I had the strange feeling that something was wrong with my Google results...

No matter what I searched for I always received an unnatural amount of results in my language, although I had the "Search whole Web" radiobutton checked.

I didn't investigate this any further, until today - I searched for a perl library to access my joystick device /dev/js0 in a useful way. It somehow surprised me that I couldn't really find anything useful on the first 3 pages when entering "linux perl joystick".

strange.

Since I trusted Google so far, I told someone else that it seems that no commonly used library seems to exist for linux. He looked quite surprised and entered "linux perl joystick" in Google - now guess what!!?

The VERY FIRST entry was CPAN with "Linux::Input::Joystick".

He looked down on me and I was like "huh? errr... Sorry, it seems that I'm too stupid to use a search engine" - but I couldn't leave it that way, so I typed those words into Google on my computer at home to look for that result.

I could NOT find it. What the hell?? So my suspicion proved to be true: Google puts a higher weight based on which locale-version of Google you use. When querying "www.google.co.uk" I suddenly found what I was looking for (Note: google.co.uk seems to return different results than google.us)


This is crap.

[^rooker]

Since I'm using FireFox's searchbar, I created a workaround for this problem - I've changed the settings for the google search:

(NOT very beautiful, and the sense of local mirrors is lost, but I haven't figured out how to tell my local google to display me REAL results)

------------------
In firefox's install folder, I've changed "searchplugins/google.src" to the following:

Code: Select all

<search 
   name="Google U.S."
   description="Definitely english Google (U.S.)"
   method="GET"
   action="http://www.google.us/search"
   updateCheckDays=0  
   queryEncoding="utf-8"
   queryCharset="utf-8"
>

<input name="q" user>
<input name="sourceid" value="mozilla-search">
<inputnext name="start" factor="10">
<inputprev name="start" factor="10">
<input name="ie" value="utf-8">
<input name="oe" value="utf-8">

<interpret 
    browserResultType="result" 
    charset = "UTF-8"
    resultListStart="<!--a-->" 
    resultListEnd="<!--z-->" 
    resultItemStart="<!--m-->" 
    resultItemEnd="<!--n-->"
>
</search>

Now the Internet makes sense for me again.

[^rooker]

whoopie!
Seems that I found a cleaner way of solving this problem:

Searching for "joystick linux perl" again:
at www.google.fr:

http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=joy ... ogle&meta=

now when I change "hl=fr" to "hl=en" things are the way I want them to be:

http://www.google.fr/search?hl=en&q=joy ... ogle&meta=



I'll post a modified FireFox searchbar configfile soon (for everyone out there being too lazy to figure out how to integrate this new information him-/herself)

[poppycat]

Over a year late on this reply *shuffles awkwardly* but a thing I have noticed with localised google as well is that some of them actually FORCE the safesearch option on me. I have to switch to english language american google if I want to do a non babified picture search. That annoys the hell out of me. Is it that only americans are allowed to be deviants or something? I am not feeling the trusting love here:(

[carmofin]

just today i was trying to search for something wii-related and google kept replacing my searchword with "wiki", google annoys me more and more altely

to their defense, at least they addded a link to their english version on the mainpage now.