From time to time you hear people stating that Google results differ from PC to PC. Now there are also a lot of claims that Google stores more personal data than in any sane persons’ interest and therefore is able to distinguish between individual users (read: pleasing them by ranking their sites of interest high up - and making money on the way with targeted advertising).

Whether there is any credibility with these claims? We can’t possibly know, since it is not easy to verify and the boundaries between technical necessities and commercially led intent are blurry at times. For instance if Google wants to distinguish between real clicks with their AdSense Product and some user who wants to either make some money, or make others pay is clicking a hundred times on the same “sponsored” link, cookies won’t do - and the IP address is the safest bet to filter these clicks. With the IP address Google then is able to know pretty well where you are, what your cultural background most likely is, store search terms affiliated with this particular IP address and so on.

What we do know though, and what this post shall be about, is that there are enormous regional differences. And they are certainly not down to the different up-to-date state of serves - as often stated.

Let’s say you search for Shakespeare (yes the poet) on the German Portal of the Californian Company and on the British counterpart.

On both the first result belongs to Google - more specifically to Google’s Book Department. The following results are very different on the two portals. The German Portal favouring sites in German, though the search was performed with the option “Das Web”( transl.: “Search the Web”) in place.

Though the diffrences don’t matter so much with great personalities, since you’ll still manage to get the equal share of information if you are persistent enough to get through at least the first three pages, it starts to matter a great deal if you are searching for more contemporary or short lived subjects.

Let’s say you search for something technical, like a certain Javascript Library - the pattern that the German portal displays more sites in German persists - but from a quality point of view the differences can be stark (the number of German speaking sites against English speaking ones surpisingly matters!). It seems that the priority of the guessed native language, overrules other aspects like relevance in quite a dramatic fashion. It is quite possible that you’ll never find a particular reference on the German Portal which features on the first result page on the British portal.

Interestingly enough if you search from a German IP address you’ll be forwarded onto the German portal even if you would like to search on the American (main) portal (www.google.com).

Now of course there is a whole bunch of well meant arguments which make the case for regionally optimised search results, but what are the implications? Surely if a whole culture or an language area (in this example Germany, Austria, Switzerland) are constently served fairly reduced differing information by the quasi monopolist, the knowledge base of that area will start to differ.

Of course these differences where always in place, but what is interesting is, that the algorithms of Google become in fact a cultural determinator in the long run. How does that fare with our current perception of the free world and its ultimate medium: the Internet? If Google isn’t Google everywhere - what precisely is Google?