Is it possible to search though multiple Google Local search indexes?

February 24, 2009 3:39 PM

Is it possible to search though Google as if from multiple locations?

First, let me state outright that I don't know anything about SEO. At all. I am a systems guy.

Today I found out one of our users here in the office is using several open proxies he has found in order to see what searching for certain terms looks like in different areas, for SEO reasons. For example, if his search term was "cheese", he would want to see how Google (and others) display results for "cheese" for IPs from several Canadian provinces and also several US states. While this is all well and good, connecting to open proxies like this is an unacceptable security risk, and so I have prevented that user from doing that. Unfortunately, this also means that I need to find another solution for his problem.

My questions, then, are:

1) First of all, would Google queries from, say, Ontario be substantially different from queries that originate in Alberta? What if I modify the search term from "cheese" to "Alberta cheese"? Does location matter then? What about across countries?

2) Is there a common tool that SEO people use to accomplish this task, or something similar? What are the usual things SEO professionals keep in their software toolboxes? I've been searching, but everything I turn up tends to be very sleazy looking.

Clearly I don't quite know what I'm talking about. If I'm really off the mark, I apologize, and would appreciate any constructive advice you could give. All I really want is for this user to continue to be productive and to quit being dangerous.

posted by tracert to computers & internet (5 comments total)

The GOOG defaults users to their local search domain but anyone can access google.ca and get the exact same experience as people in Canada (for example).

On the advanced search page there's a "region" option that has the same effect as searching from a country-specific domain with the "only results for XXX" option selected. You can also search for results in different languages on that page.

You might see different geo-targeted advertising I suppose as AdWords advertisers can select what countries they want their ads shown in. The ads may different going via proxies. But the search results should be the same.
posted by GuyZero at 3:49 PM on February 24

I am not up-to-date on SEO, but I can tell you what I learned a few weeks ago when I was on vacation in Costa Rica.

They seem to use geolocation of IP addresses to make assumptions about what to show you. Even though my computer was set to the EN_us locale, going to www.google.com showed me a site in Spanish. If I recall correctly, I think it redirected me to cr.google.com or www.google.com/cr or something along those lines.

Search results were different for me down there than back here (in St. Louis, USA). I'm not sure if that's simply because it simply had a preference for pages in Spanish or whether it used my current location in determining relevance. In other words, I am not sure if setting my locale to ES_cr and doing a search from St. Louis would yield the same results as having EN_us and doing a search from Costa Rica.

Going to www.google.us from down there let me access what seemed like the normal www.google.com I'd get here, with page text and search results in English.
posted by tomwheeler at 4:43 PM on February 24

I meant to also add that probably the most reliable way to fool geolocation services is to use a remote proxy server. For example, hulu.com does not allow viewers outside the US to view shows.

It's trivial to get around this by creating a tunnel to a machine based in the US and relaying the traffic from there. The same technique would also fool Google into thinking you're in a different province or country if you have access to a machine hosted there.
posted by tomwheeler at 4:49 PM on February 24

You can route through a Tor node in the region of interest, perhaps. OTOH, Google does seem to track the addresses of Tor exit nodes and treat them specially (you get a captcha), so I suppose it's possible they don't apply IP-address-based tweaks if they see you coming from a known proxy. (Not sure why they'd go to that trouble, but they might.)
posted by hattifattener at 12:20 AM on February 25

I think most people just as you mention use open proxies for this task. SEO tools are generally sleazy since SEO in itself is a shady business.
posted by ilike at 2:35 AM on February 25