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Crippled version of Google?
A client called me today and asked why his site wasn’t appearing in Google. I had created his humble site www.nbtrans.ie a few months earlier. So I opened google.ie and searched for noel brennan transport with the ‘pages from Ireland’ option selected. Lo and behold, there he was, first up. That was news to him. So I searched with ‘the web’ as the option and there he was again, first on the list.
Thinking later, I remembered him using the google search on Eircom.net when he was showing me competitor websites. So I wondered could the result be different in an ‘enhanced by google’ search on Eircom.net. He didn’t appear, not anywhere. So I did a bit more digging and started to notice other differences.
Naturally I double-checked. I even tried resetting my google preferences. Different results, not just search-result order, but number of results found. Take a look at the table below, see what I mean.
Digging further, I tried the same searches on iol.ie. Same results as eircom. Could the Irish ISPs bet getting a limited search? So I tried for my friend Noel on tiscali.co.uk. No sign of him, but similar results as Eircom and IOL.
The consistent difference between the ‘native’ google search and the Eircom/IOL version of google was the number of results. The ‘native’ google always had more results found. Which leads me to the question – is there a crippled (limited) version of google search for search partners?
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