Changes in Google.co.uk

I've long taken it for granted that search results in google.co.uk were pretty much exactly the same as results in google.com unless the "pages from UK only" button was checked. This was substantiated by long hours of checking both .co.uk & .com results for many industries over the last few years. There were rarely differences, and if there were, these were refected in the various data-centres results.

This is no longer the case.

It seems that during the recent update google.co.uk's results were tweaked to give results that are often biased towards the UK.

I first noticed this when a site that has so far bombed in the Jagger update—several #1 spots down to below 100 or 200 or even 300— reappeared in the top 20 of google.co.uk. I checked all the data-centres - site was still below 100. Checked google.co.uk again, still in top twenty. I checked I hadn't got the "sites from UK only" button checked - Nope. Deleted cookies, still the same top 20 results. Used different browsers, different machines, location, ISPs. The result was always the same - in the top 20 for google.co.uk, under 100 in google.com and no data-centres showed the top 20 result.

So I checked a few more phrases. Some were fairly different between the two, some mildly different, some showed no changes.

Then I got a few friends around the world to try it. I got them to try the same keyword on google.co.uk & google.com. They got the same results as I. Whether they were in the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, or Switzerland made no difference – they got different results for google.co.uk & google.com.

The keyword in this case was "football". In google.com the first result is www.nfl.com, whereas in google.co.uk the first result is www.football365.com - which is about proper football ;).

I've tried several key words & phrases and the results are pretty consistent - Google.co.uk is often returning results that aren't the same as google.com - it's biasing it's SERPs towards the UK - and that's new.

Hi,
well thats heartening news.
We're not seeing that yet for electronics related terms (the ones we monitor). Still lots of US/Brazil/Spain sites popping up, most of which weren't there before.
Update is still on going I suppose.

Also, we are seeing a big disparaty between singular and plural results - such as widget versus widgets, more than before this update started.

I have seen this kind of results for a few years. The only thing that I feel is effecting the football results is the whois information.

I've never seen any significant disparity between the .com & co.uk results before as explained above. This difference is new. It doesn't just effect 'football', it effects a multitude of terms that last week gave identical results on both .co.uk & .com.

Re search "football", the top ten do look pretty much the same for google.co.uk and when selecting UK, maybe there'll be a roll out on other terms as well.

Pretty much the same yes, but not THE same, and the UK results aren't replicated on ANY data-centre.

Try beer, or government - UK biased results on google.co.uk for the first time.