If you are looking for regionally sensitive information on the Web, you use a
regional search tool, right? That's what you might think. But I tried out this
theory on four global search tools and their UK versions and compared the results.
I found that you were either better off or no worse off using the global version
in almost every case. Of course, that's just on the basis of relatively few searches.
But some relevant sites only came up in the UK version of the search tool and
some only came up in the global version. This is enough to make me very wary of
assuming that regional search tools will allow a comprehensive search in many
instances.
I have long been quite skeptical about regional versions of global search tools
and I am even more so after carrying out some recent searches on them with the
specific aim of observing the results they give. Search tools have no sure criteria
for selecting sites on the basis of their regional content. Editorial selection
is employed in some search tools but only to a limited extent. And this may be
unfeasible at times because, while some types of information are regionally sensitive,
many sites consist of a mixture of regionally sensitive and regionally neutral
material.
Duncan Parry, a Category Editor for Lycos UK, agrees. "Filtering which sites
to include is a problem and different sites approach this in different ways. One
of the complications is that .com, .net and .org domains are used by many non
US companies. So excluding sites by domain suffix isn't a practical approach,"
says Parry.
"For directories," adds Parry, "it is up to the human editor to choose between
sites. Of course, some topics are not regional so the quality of content and ease
of use of a site are the main criteria applied. For example, on Lycos UK many
sites in the Computers directory are outside the UK, given the global nature of
the topics. However all the sites in Shopping and Commercial Services are UK based
or clearly serve the UK."
When you are buying things, the cost of the product and the location of outlets
is regionally sensitive. But more general information about certain products is
not always regionally sensitive. You could do a lot of research into electrical
goods or cars, for example, without worrying if the information is regionally
relevant. On the other hand, much information about financial products and legal
services would be specific to a region. But, sure enough, many sites I looked
at in detail contained both types of information. The best thing the search tools
could do is to be as inclusive as possible, but they don’t always do this
in practice.
I searched for Internet statistics, banks, my own name, shops in my area and
various other keywords. I found that the regional versions of the global search
tools excluded useful sites with a regional slant. And there was no guarantee
of finding all the regionally relevant sites if I just used the global version
of the tool. The two versions of the search tools simply had different indexes
and it was often necessary to search both. In particular, I tried out various
search terms relating to buying a mandolin in the UK.
You can find out a lot about mandolins on the Web, what styles of instrument
there are, the pitfalls of buying, all sorts of things to help you gen up on the
subject. This is clearly not regionally sensitive and you can use your favorite
search tool to comb through the best sites available. It's very easy to find good
resources and you'd be foolish to limit yourself to UK sites at this point.
Then, assuming you don't wish to buy online, you need to find out where the shops
are and what sort of prices you can expect to be charged. This clearly is regionally
sensitive. There may not be so many sites to choose from but you should be able
to find some contact details and do a little phoning around. I found this type
of information, but mostly on sites that also contained regionally neutral information.
There are specific shopping sites on the Web too. But they were so limited in
the information they gave that I didn't spend much time on them.
Briefly, with AltaVista I was no worse off using the global version, whether
I used keywords or the directory. With Yahoo I was better off using the global
version with keywords and no worse off using the directory. The UK version of
the Lycos directory gave me no great advantage and when using keywords I did better
with the global version. And Google's UK version didn't lend any advantage.
I have tried to find other articles on the subject of regional search tools just
so I could find out why people thought they were better than global ones for certain
sorts of information. Aside from the obvious reason, that much information is
of local significance only, I could find just one other reason: people are very
upset if they get seven million hits when they know that regional tools will return
fewer results.
Well, as far as I can see there's no difference between seven million hits and
seven thousand hits. You will never search through all of them in either case,
so it's not worth worrying about. If the sites you want are not coming up in the
first few pages of hits then either you or the search tool are doing something
wrong. You have to work out a strategy or you'll end up wasting a lot of time.
Therefore, the introduction of regional versions of search tools seems to have
had the effect of fragmenting results. They sometimes exclude sites that they
shouldn't exclude. This is more of a reflection on the nature of search than a
criticism of the search tools. What is and what is not relevant in results is
often very much in the mind of the searcher. And it's hard to say what search
tools could do to improve the situation. In the future the problem may be solved
by XML or some form of metadata standard. But that still leaves the problem of
what to do with sites that contain both types of information. Clearly, such sites
should appear in both the regional and the global versions of search tools and
this doesn't seem to be happening at present.
According to Duncan Parry, tools like WhoIs could be used to determine the location
of a site server and decide from that the regional focus of a domain. "But this
would only be helpful in a limited way in excluding sites from search engine databases,"
cautions Parry. "That doesn't even take into account the time and technology involved
in automating this. I do wonder if some sort of meta tag should be made a HTML
standard that specifies a country code (or global interest). Of course, this presents
difficulties of enforcement, changing existing sites, etc."
On the basis of what I have found thus far, I will not be changing my surfing
habits radically. I'll suspend judgement to some extent but I'll use the global
versions of the major search tools most of the time. Whenever a search tool claims
to be regionally biased I'll want to know what criteria they use to select sites
and why I should believe that relevant material has not been excluded.
Simon Collery is a UK writer who focuses on reviews of useful
online services for business professionals. His background includes extensive
contributions to Free Pint,
a popular online destination for the UK wired professional. Previously he has
worked as a Reader for the Oxford English Dictionary. Traffick welcomes Simon
as a regular columnist.
