8 replies to this topic

[send2paul]

Google Isle of Man - is this the smallest geographic area for a Google search engine?

And - what's the point?

[swainzy]

:scratchhead: Ditto

[yannis]

And - what's the point?

tax heaven?

yannis

[TheManBehindTheCurtain]

Well, if while there you Google for the exact phrase "Isle of Man" you told there are about 21,300,000 results. If you go out to the limit ... for me that was 775 results. How "big" or "small" do you have to be?

I think it doesn't matter, as long as - I'm guessing here - someone is willing to pay for geo-targeted Adwords ....

F.

tax heaven?

yannis

Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

Since only two things are certain, death and taxes, hopefully heaven is a haven for taxes ... because we have tax hell here on earth.

[yannis]

Since only two things are certain, death and taxes, hopefully heaven is a haven for taxes ... because we have tax hell here on earth.

"Isle of Tax"?


Yannis

[bwelford]

Isn't Micronesia smaller than the Isle of Man?

[send2paul]

But really...... why does Google do this? I'm honestly, really, really interested as to why this is done?

(Where's the Google Birthday Boy - John M when you need him, eh? )

[JohnMu]

I'm just guessing, but I imagine the work involved with setting up a new ccTLD for Google is pretty minimal (especially if it's in an existing language), so why not do it :-) ?

I don't think it has much to do with Geotargeting -- but on the other hand, I have no idea how different the people there feel (compared to people in say England).

Regarding the smallest community covered, I found it interesting that even the Swiss Romantsch language is covered by Google: http://www.google.ch/webhp?hl=rm (according to Wikipedia there are only something like 35k people who said it was their main language -- compared to 80k people living in Isle of Man). I bet there are smaller communities that are covered though, heh.

I did however notice that we don't have a version specifically for South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, despite there being a population of ~20. I suppose the cut-off is somewhere in between those numbers .

John

[send2paul]

Hey hey! Thanks Birthday Boy!

Soooooooo, they serve no purpose at all then, Jon? I mean - if I use the Isle of Man Google or .com, or .co.uk - I'll get the same results, right? (My searches going through one data centre regardless of the Google domain extension I'm searching in?- or have I got that mixed up?)