Google’s Affection for China and Japan
August 31, 2008 by abhishek
Filed under Google Tricks
We now know that Google uses country specific domains. That means, if you are in India and try to open www.google.com, then you will be automatically redirected to www.google.co.in or say www.google.co.uk for United Kingdom. But what if you want to escape from this smart move of Google i.e. don’t want to be redirected to country/region specific Google home instead want to open or navigate to plain and original google.com.
Well, here’s a little trick. Try www.google.com/ncr, where ncr stands for no country redirect.
There can be two answers for why Google adapted country specific domains. Primarily, home page is customized for native language and secondarily you have an option to get results from country specific only. Other reasons include location of Google servers and time zone.
Google home page for nearly 160 countries is same plain white with few other localized options. One of the interesting fact for bare white page is that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Even the results are sometimes different from these different country specific domains. You can use this tool to compare results from different countries.
However Google home page for China and japan are completely different from rest of the world. Its difficult to understand this partial behavior of Google. Let us look at the Japanese home page of the search engine giant.
The Home page contains 4 tabs – Recommended, Various search, Useful tool and More enjoyable which includes links for the most popular Google products and other less known products such as Google books, Google desktop, Google mobile, Google transit etc.
Similarly, home page for Chinese version has beautiful user interface with links to Google Video, Shenghuo, GoogleFinance and Ditu(maps).
May be its time for Google to use same standards all over the world. This is at least what we can expect from our search god, Google. Noteworthy, India is ahead of China and Japan in Google search trends. For reference, this is the list of all Google country specific domains.
