Google's Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Designs

Google has announced tah the Blogger Template Designer is now available to all (not just Blogger in Draft).
Original Article: Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."

Features of the template designer include:

- 15 new templates (with more on the way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts, and more.

"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.

Google Named In Class Action Suit Over Street View

Google has been named in a new class action lawsuit filed by Carp Law Offices on behalf of Galaxy Internet Services and it WiFi users in Massachusetts.

The suit is focused on the collection and storage of WiFi information by Google's Street View team. The suit alleges Google had covert packet sniffing WiFi receivers to help gather data on WiFi users. The suit says the practice is in violation of both federal privacy laws and Massachusetts's new data privacy law.

Google has admitted it did collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using its Street View cars. Google says the collection of private data from WiFi networks was unintentional.




"Google had no reason to collect WiFi information, despite their rationale that they had not used the information and that the 'payload data' they collected was only network information available to anyone," said Robert Carp of Carp Law Offices.

"It is our client's belief and the belief of the class action members that the data they extracted was private information, and they have violated both Federal and Massachusetts state privacy laws."

The complaint asks for class action certification, and for an injunction to prevent Google from destroying any of the data that could be used for evidence in a class action trial in Federal court.

Google says it has stopped its Street View cars from collecting any WiFi network data and it also has introduced SSL encryption on its search engine.

Google Partners With Biggest Energy Monitor Manufacturer

The Google PowerMeter energy monitoring tool may be ready to go from interesting experiment to omnipresent product. Google announced today that it's entered a partnership with Current Cost, the largest global supplier of real-time displays that monitor energy usage.

Neither organization is wasting time on paperwork or small-scale tests. A post on the Official Google.org Blog explained, "Current Cost will now offer devices that are compatible with Google PowerMeter. They will also offer upgrades to existing customers so that they too can monitor their energy consumption anywhere online with our software."



The post then continued, "Devices that integrate with Google PowerMeter will first be available in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand." Plus, "E.ON, one of the UK's largest utilities, has also teamed up with Current Cost to offer its customers a Google PowerMeter compatible energy monitor as part of its free 'Energy Fit Starter Pack.'"

These developments should put Google's name in front of a lot more people on a regular basis, acting as free advertising. They constitute fantastic PR, too, considering that Google PowerMeter promises to help folks both go green and save money.

It'll be very interesting to see what sort of adoption rate the PowerMeter/Current Cost technology achieves in the weeks and months ahead.

Google Releases Playable PAC-MAN Doodle

Google has released a really cool playable doodle of PAC-MAN to celebrate the game's 30th birthday.

The Google Blog offers all the fun details. "Today, on PAC-MAN's 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it's too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the 'Insert Coin' button or just wait for a few seconds."



Google says it has included all the original sounds and graphics of the original PAC-MAN along with an easter egg for Ms. PAC-MAN.
source : www.webpronews.com

Will Google Buzz Change the Social Media Game?

Buzz has gotten off to a great start in terms of attracting users. Google said in a blog post yesterday that over 9 million posts and comments had been created, and they were seeing over 200 posts per minute. Both numbers have likely grown since then.

In the post, Google addresses some of the privacy concerns people have been having, and improvements they're making based on user feedback.

Update: Google has uploaded the entire Google Buzz launch event. If you are interested in seeing the new product unveiled, you can watch it below:



Article starts: Google held a press event to announce the most "buzzed" topic of the week - Google Buzz. This is Google's new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, and appears to be one of the missing links in tying Google together as a social network, a concept we've discussed repatedly.

Editor's Note: The bulk of this article was written before the announcement was made and has been adjusted to reflect the announcement itself, after liveblogging the press event.



Google says Buzz has five key elements:

1. Auto Following
2. Rich, Fast Sharing experience...
3. Support for public and private sharing....
4. In-box integration
5. Just the good stuff...



Buzz will show a thumbnail of a YouTube video and make it easy to play in line. With photos, they will show thumbnails, but Google built a custom photo viewer, which lets you flip through pictures and see them "big and fast". If you share links, it will automatically fetch headlines and photos from the post (similar to Facebook). You can "like" and "unlike" stuff, and expand comments. It works with keyword shortcuts from Gmail.

Public/Private sharing - The post box will let you post updates publicly or privately. If it's public, it will go to your Google profile, and is indexed by Google's real-time search. You can share privately, and it will let you send to groups and custom groups.

In your in-box, you will see buzz notifications that contain real-time comments. It sits in the same in-box as your regular email, but you can move between your regular in-box and your Buzz stuff. It integrates it right into Gmail.You can also use "@" for replies like with Twitter.

While Google Buzz is presented as a Gmail feature, it goes well beyond Gmail. For one, all public updates you post will be posted to your Google profile page, (which is searchable). In addition, Google launched three new mobile products for Buzz:

1. The ability to use Buzz from www.Google.com on iPhone/Android
2. Brand new app at buzz.google.com
3. Maps Update for Nokia Symbian/ Android.

Mobile could be one of the biggest keys to the success of this product. Google says Google.com is the world's most popular mobile home page, and Buzz can be accessed from there on iPhone and Android devices. Android's popularity is growing quickly too.



Buzz will find your location (if you let it) and snap your updates to that location. With the Google Maps feature, you can see what people are saying based on location. You can even use voice recognition to post buzz updates by voice.

Google: "Buzz Will Be Just Another Node"

When Google announced Google Buzz earlier this week, the company made it abundantly clear that it was interested in Buzz being as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you'll see that support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are "coming soon."

What all of this means is that Google is working to make Buzz content something that can be used in as many services as possible, while letting as many services as possible come into Buzz.

"The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle," says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. "The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format."

Google has most recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, that can include things like:

- public profile data
- pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
- a public key
- other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
- a URL to an avatar
- profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
- whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it's NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
- or even a public declaration that the email address doesn't have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles. Google's Brad Fitzpatrick discusses more technical details about it here.

Google Highlights Answers in Search Results

Google has launched a new feature for search called "answer highlighting." This is based on Google Squared, Google's structured data project announced last year at the company's Searchology event. What it does is highlight answers to applicable queries within the search snippet.

For example, if the query is "empire state height," it will bold the actual answer for that, in addition to the words used in the query. Previously, it would have only bolded those words.



"Most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don't follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to synthesize and understand information on the web," says Google. "Google Squared is one of our early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. We've been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called 'answer highlighting.'"

Don't expect answer highlighting to be present in all search results, because in many cases, it just doesn't make sense. You are more likely to come across it when there are specific answers or data involved.

Google also launched rich snippets for events today. To learn more about the RDFa, which helps Google find content for rich snippets. Google has been using rich snippets for things like product reviews, and people information, but now events will sometimes utilize them. For example, if you search for a concert venue, you may see a few upcoming concerts listed.

Google States Case for Online News in WSJ

Original Article: Google has created a new web crawler specifically for Google News. What this means is that publishers who do not want Google News to index their content can more easily control that. That also applies to publishers who don't wish to completely cut out indexing, but wish to limit/restrict certain elements of their content from being indexed.

Google offers this new crawler at a time when Google's relationship with online news is a heavy focus of discussion throughout the industry, with the FTC's meeting of the media minds taking place. This week Google already announced some changes to how it handles paid content (by offering a five-article limit for the "first click free" plan). Now the company appears to be further extending its olive branch to concerned publishers (whether or not that will be enough is another discussion).

In the past, publishers have been able to block Google from content via robots.txt and the Robots Extension Protocol (REP). They have also been able to keep content out of Google News and stay in Google Search, by using a contact form provided by Google. Now, Google is making it so publishers don't even have to contact them.

"Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today," says Google News Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen. "In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP."

"While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting out of News is the same as it's always been," says Cohen. "It means that content won't be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News index. For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, but they won't appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the Google News index."

Cohen says Google News users shouldn't notice any difference in their experience with the service. It will be interesting to see the reaction from disgruntled publishers, and whether or not this will make any significant difference in how they view Google News.

Google Introduces New Drawing and Form Features for Docs

Google has launched some new features for Google Docs. They have made a couple improvements to drawings and added several new features to Forms.

As far as drawings, Google has made it easier for users to build flowcharts, by adding 20 new shapes for standard flowchart components. In addition, users now have more control over drawing text layout by supporting explicit line breaks in text boxes and text within shapes. The features can be accessed, by simply inserting a drawing into any document, spreadsheet, or presentation.

As far as forms, you can now gather responses for a group of similar questions in a new, compact grid format. The Grid question type lets users label several columns and create a limitless number of new rows. Row results appear in their own spreadsheet columns with their own summary charts.

The summary charts themselves actually have new formatting as well:

The form editor supports right-to-left text input now. “When you enter RTL text in the form editor, it will automatically switch the directionality of the form editor and rendered forms (similar to Gmail and other Google Apps),” explains User Interface Software Engineer Eric Bogs on the Google Docs blog. “This means your text and questions will flip directionality, making it easier for RTL users to create and use forms.”

Google Apps customers have two options for using forms within their organizations now. They can automatically collect respondents’ usernames as usual, and they can also now require sign-in to view a form.

Google Shares New Privacy Policy for Books

Google has introduced a new privacy policy for Google Books, to try and appease the critics of Google's enormous book indexing project. The company has also been in communication with the Federal Trade Commission, and has discussed both the new policy and a letter to the FTC on the Google Public Policy Blog.


Google is still waiting approval from the court on its settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, so some services discussed in the privacy policy don't even exist yet.

"Our privacy policies are usually based on detailed review of a final product -- and on weeks, months or years of careful work engineering the product itself to protect privacy," says Google Global Privacy Counsel Jane Horvath. "In this case, we've planned in advance for the protections that will later be built, and we've described some of those in the Google Books policy."

The privacy policy can be read here.

Google Releases Instant Messaging API

Google has announced the release of a new API for building Talk bots on top of Google App Engine, Google's product that lets developers create and host web apps on the Google infrastructure.

Google has released version 1.2.5 of the App Engine software developer kit (SDK) for Python and Java. This happens to be the company's first simultaneous release for both. The API includes XMPP (also referred to as Jabber) support, which is an open standard for instant messaging. This comes in the form of the XMPP API for both SDKs.

"Like the other APIs that App Engine provides for developers, XMPP is built on the same powerful infrastructure that serves other Google products," says Google on the App Engine Blog. "In this case, we take advantage of the servers that run Google Talk. This new API allows your app to exchange messages with users on any XMPP-based network, including (but not limited to!) Google Talk."

Developers involved with the preview of Google Wave can also use the API to build bots that interact with waves. Wave will be available to schools and businesses this fall, by the way.
"We're very proud of our first XMPP release, but there's still more work to do," says Google. "In the future we hope to provide even more functionality to apps, such as user status (presence) and info on new subscriptions."

More information about the API and SDKs can be found in this post.

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Four New Gmail Themes Released

Gmail users who require that everything be just so may be in luck; a few new personalization opportunities have been made available in the form of four new themes. And in fact, one of the four themes caters to indecisive types, so members of the Gmail team really covered their bases.

All right, we admit it - these Gmail themes aren't going to generate Google's next billion dollars. In all likelihood, they won't even convince more than one or two souls (if that) to switch from Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

Still, these are the first new themes in about ten months, so on we go.

Pictured on the left below is a screenshot of what Googlers Jake Knapp and Manu Cornet identified on the Official Gmail Blog as the "Orcas Island" theme. Knapp promised "a new image each day of the week."

On the right, you can see what Cornet called "High Score." It should seem familiar to anyone who spent more than a few minutes playing the original Nintendo.

The third theme is called "Turf." It shows some green grass and not much more. Finally, Cornet wrote that the "Random" theme "merely cycles through all the others."

Knapp and Cornet welcomed feedback if you're inclined to give it, and they also indicated that still more themes might wander down the pipeline at some point.

Google News Italia Probe Expands

Google received a piece of bad news - and perhaps a laugh - today as we prepare to go into the long weekend. Here's the serious part: Italian antitrust regulators have decided to expand the focus of an investigation from the Italian version of Google News to the entire corporation.

Things began to heat up last week when an Italian newspaper federation claimed that Google would exclude papers from its normal search results when they opted out of Google News. Google Italy's offices got searched, and the concept of an $18.5 million fine was mentioned.

Now, according to an AGI article, Italy's antitrust authority has stated, "On the basis of inspections by the authority, it has been found that the management of the Google News Italia service, currently under a preliminary investigation, was handled by Google Inc."

What brilliant detective work, right? Sherlock Holmes has been reincarnated in Rome.

Still, given a choice between chuckling at obvious statements and not facing an inquiry, Google would probably pick the second option. The fact that this investigation's picked up speed in just one week isn't a great sign.

source:http://www.webpronews.com/

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New Trend Tracking Feature in Google Finance

Google has introduced Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance. This is a feature that tracks search traffic (on Google) across specific sectors of the economy.

"The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight," Google says. "We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment. Each index value is baselined at 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts."

The trends the feature tracks include:

- Advertising and Marketing
- Air Travel
- Auto Buyers
- Auto Financing
- Automotive
- Banking and Personal Finance
- Business
- Computers and Electronics
- Construction
- Credit and Lending
- Durable Goods
- Finance and Insurance
- Furniture
- Industries
- Investments
- Jobs
- Luxury Goods
- Mortgage
- Real Estate
- Rental
- Retail Trade
- Travel
- Unemployment

Google shares an example of the Luxuries Index, which tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany], etc.

Data from the indexes are available for download, letting users utilize it in their own models. More information about the indexes can be found here. The Domestic Trends feature comes as the result of research from Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian, who explains his methodology here.


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Google News SEO Tips - Ranking in News Search

I thought that one of the more interesting topics addressed at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a while back was that of SEO and the publishing industry. This is an industry seemingly at war with entities like Google (at least partially), even though there are clearly measures publishers could take, which would make Google and Google News in particular work to their advantage.

Have you had success ranking in Google News? Comment.

Google News is a very useful resource to online news seekers. It seems to get more and more useful as time goes on. For example, they just started incorporating real-time search suggestions into news queries. Publishers should embrace such a tool (Google News) that users themselves embrace, and can ultimately gain them more traffic.



his week, Google has shared some insight into search engine optimization practices for news search. Publishers could learn a lot from the following video.
In addition to the video, Google's Maile Ohye answered a couple of questions about Google News SEO on the Google News blog. For one, she says that adding a city to the title of the publication will not help publishers target their local audience, because Google extracts geography and location information from the articles themselves.

"Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings," she says.

She also says that Google only wants recently added URLs in publishers' News Sitemaps, because they direct Googlebot to the publishers' breaking information. "If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl," says Ohye.

A few weeks ago, a patent was granted to Google for "systems and method for improving the ranking of news articles." The patent was originally filed way back in 2003, so there is no question that some of the details have changed, but within it there are a number of factors highlighted, some of which may be ranking factors Google News considers.

In one "implementation consistent with the principles of the invention," here are some factors that are mentioned:

- a number of articles produced by the news source during a first time period

- an average length of an article produced by the news source

- an amount of important coverage that the news source produces in a second time period

- a breaking news score

- an amount of network traffic to the news source

- a human opinion of the news source

- circulation statistics of the news source

- a size of a staff associated with the news source

- a number of bureaus associated with the news source

- a number of original named entities in a group of articles associated with the news source

- a breadth of coverage by the news source

- a number of different countries from which network traffic to the news source originates

- the writing style used by the news source

A couple months ago, Google posted a Google News publisher FAQ page. That answers questions like:

- Can I suggest my personal website for inclusion in Google News?

- What requirements do I have to meet in order to be included in Google News?

- My website was accepted in Google News a few days ago, but I still can't find my articles. Is something wrong?

- Why aren't my images showing up in Google News?

- Why do all my articles have a strange title in Google News, like "Share this" or "By Jane Q. Journalist"?

- What is the "unique number" or "3 digit" rule?

- Should I submit a News sitemap?

- Why can't I see the option to submit a News sitemap in Webmaster Tools?

- Once I've submitted a News sitemap, do I have to resubmit it each time I publish a new article?

- If I submit a News sitemap, will Google News stop crawling my regular section pages?

- How often does Google News crawl my News sitemap? In Webmaster Tools, it appears to be crawled only once per day.

- Why have my articles stopped appearing in Google News, even though they've been showing up previously?

The moral of the story is that there are a lot of things you can look at if you are serious about getting traffic from Google News, whether you are already being picked up or not. The best part is that most of it is straight from Google itself.

Google Homepage Patent Gratuitous?

In early 2004, Google's lawyers didn't have nearly enough to do. A patent on the design of Google's homepage (AKA its "[g]raphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal") that they applied for at that time was granted Tuesday.

Let us know what you think in the comments section.

What Google's going to do with the patent is, frankly, anybody's guess. No corporation with the ability to approach Google's effectiveness at search would be dumb enough to copy its exact design. And it'd be a rare judge who would let Google take action against Yahoo or other search rivals on the basis of similarities born out of identical functions.

There's a question of prior art, as well, since Google might not have been the first entity to stick a search box in the middle of a mostly-blank page.

Anyway, in case you're curious, part of the patent states, "The single view is a front view of a graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal."

Also, "The broken line of the display screen and the broken line showing of certain words and numbers in the drawing are for illustrative purposes only and form no part of the claimed design."

source: http://www.webpronews.com/

Another Google Summer Of Code Concludes

Google's fifth Summer of Code has ended, and by all accounts, it was quite a success. Indeed, the students' official success rate this year was judged to be the highest ever, and with 2,000 mentors and 1,000 students participating, that's no statistical fluke.

The Summer of Code is, in case you didn't know, a program Google runs to bring young people into contact with free and open source projects. Accepted students are given a choice between many different projects (there were 150 options this year), along with mentors and stipends.

This presents them with the opportunity to pick up coding skills, forge professional connections, and make a little cash. It's a very good deal for which many people compete.

And that brings us back to this year's record-high success rate. As a post on the Official Google Blog acknowledges, "85 percent of our student participants have successfully completed their projects." That number hasn't been higher than 83 percent in the past.

Leslie Hawthorn, the Summer of Code Program Manager, then continued, "We'd like to congratulate all of our student participants for their hard work and tremendous achievements this summer. We're excited to hear that many of our students have planned out the next few months of their coding work with their chosen open source project."

Google Shares Interesting Malware Stats

Google is sharing some interesting statistics on malware, such as the number of entries on the Google Safe Browsing Malware List that have occurred over the last twelve months, and search results containing a URL labeled as harmful.

“We’re glad to share this sort of data because we believe that collaboration and information sharing are crucial in driving anti-malware efforts forward,” says Niels Provos of Google’s Security Team.

Number of Entries on the Google Safe Browsing Malware List

“As we mentioned in our Top-10 Malware Sites blog post, we have seen a large increase in the number of compromised sites since April,” says Provos. “The number of entries on our malware list has more than doubled in one year, and we have seen periods in which 40,000 web sites were compromised per week. However, compared to infections associated with Gumblar and Martuz — two relatively large and well-known pieces of malicious code, many compromised web sites now point to hundreds of different domains.”

In January of last year, 1.2% of all Google search queries contained at least one such result. The trend has mostly been downward in the time that has passed since then, although you can see fluctuations.

Search Results Containing a URL Labeled as Harmful

Google says that as malware trends evolve, they’re constantly improving their systems to better detect compromised sites. The company notes that the increase in compromised sites they observed could partially be influenced by such improvements.

Google Rolling Out AdSense Relevancy Improvements

Google announced (subtly) that it is rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities to more accurately match relevant ads to AdSense publishers’ pages.

Unfortunately, not many details about these enhancements were given away, but Google says AdSense publishers will not have to update their AdSense accounts or ad code. Changes will be applied automatically.

“Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance,” says AdSense Product Manager Woojin Kim. “In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don’t seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we’re continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.”

The changes will not affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites. Placement-targeted ads that advertisers bid on to appear specifically on your page, for example, will continue to appear.

These relevancy-determining changes are not the only thing the AdSense team has been up to. This week, they announced that they have tweaked the default fonts for different ad formats, in order to trigger better performance. Category filtering was also announced for AdSense for Feeds.

Google's Matt Cutts on .com Relevancy in UK

Some UK Google users have noticed that search results pages are showing more results from .com sites these days, than in the past. They are used to .co.uk sites getting better rank, and assuming that they are more relevant to their geographic location.

Certainly in some cases the .co.uk site would be more relevant to a UK searcher, but that is not always the case. Google's Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he answers a question on this subject from a user. The question was:

Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high on Google.co.uk since early June?
Cutts says it is true that searchers in the UK will see more .com results, and that is simply a product of Google getting better at determining geographic relevancy.

As Google gets better, they're more willing to show .com results if they're relevant to the country. "If the best result for a British searcher is something that ends in .com, we still want to show that to that British searcher," says Cutts.

According to Cutts, this is a change that Google will not likely reverse, although he does encourage users to let them know if they see such results that aren't relevant, because they would want to improve this.

The bottom line is that Google is just learning more these days about what sites are associated with what countries, and they're better at detecting it. The goal is to supply relevant results.

As a bonus, Cutts posted to his blog that he's already received some criticism about his answer in the above video and responded:

There’s a couple effects going on:

- first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely to see .coms in the UK. I’d say that’s 80-90% of the changes that people are seeing. Most of the generic TLDs (.com, .net, etc.) that are showing up now are .com sites like tescofinance.com and churchill.com that are relevant to the UK even though they don’t end in a .co.uk.

- I’ve been following some of the examples people have pointed out. I remember kiva.org in particular was mentioned and that probably is off-topic for the UK. I dug into that one, and it was an unrelated ranking experiment that was going on that we changed.