If you are looking for regionally sensitive information on the Web, you use a regional search tool, right? That's what you might think. But I tried out this theory on four global search tools and their UK versions and compared the results. I found that you were either better off or no worse off using the global version in almost every case. Of course, that's just on the basis of relatively few searches. But some relevant sites only came up in the UK version of the search tool and some only came up in the global version. This is enough to make me very wary of assuming that regional search tools will allow a comprehensive search in many instances.

I have long been quite skeptical about regional versions of global search tools and I am even more so after carrying out some recent searches on them with the specific aim of observing the results they give. Search tools have no sure criteria for selecting sites on the basis of their regional content. Editorial selection is employed in some search tools but only to a limited extent. And this may be unfeasible at times because, while some types of information are regionally sensitive, many sites consist of a mixture of regionally sensitive and regionally neutral material.

Duncan Parry, a Category Editor for Lycos UK, agrees. "Filtering which sites to include is a problem and different sites approach this in different ways. One of the complications is that .com, .net and .org domains are used by many non US companies. So excluding sites by domain suffix isn't a practical approach," says Parry.

"For directories," adds Parry, "it is up to the human editor to choose between sites. Of course, some topics are not regional so the quality of content and ease of use of a site are the main criteria applied. For example, on Lycos UK many sites in the Computers directory are outside the UK, given the global nature of the topics. However all the sites in Shopping and Commercial Services are UK based or clearly serve the UK."

When you are buying things, the cost of the product and the location of outlets is regionally sensitive. But more general information about certain products is not always regionally sensitive. You could do a lot of research into electrical goods or cars, for example, without worrying if the information is regionally relevant. On the other hand, much information about financial products and legal services would be specific to a region. But, sure enough, many sites I looked at in detail contained both types of information. The best thing the search tools could do is to be as inclusive as possible, but they don’t always do this in practice.

I searched for Internet statistics, banks, my own name, shops in my area and various other keywords. I found that the regional versions of the global search tools excluded useful sites with a regional slant. And there was no guarantee of finding all the regionally relevant sites if I just used the global version of the tool. The two versions of the search tools simply had different indexes and it was often necessary to search both. In particular, I tried out various search terms relating to buying a mandolin in the UK.

You can find out a lot about mandolins on the Web, what styles of instrument there are, the pitfalls of buying, all sorts of things to help you gen up on the subject. This is clearly not regionally sensitive and you can use your favorite search tool to comb through the best sites available. It's very easy to find good resources and you'd be foolish to limit yourself to UK sites at this point.

Then, assuming you don't wish to buy online, you need to find out where the shops are and what sort of prices you can expect to be charged. This clearly is regionally sensitive. There may not be so many sites to choose from but you should be able to find some contact details and do a little phoning around. I found this type of information, but mostly on sites that also contained regionally neutral information. There are specific shopping sites on the Web too. But they were so limited in the information they gave that I didn't spend much time on them.

Briefly, with AltaVista I was no worse off using the global version, whether I used keywords or the directory. With Yahoo I was better off using the global version with keywords and no worse off using the directory. The UK version of the Lycos directory gave me no great advantage and when using keywords I did better with the global version. And Google's UK version didn't lend any advantage.

I have tried to find other articles on the subject of regional search tools just so I could find out why people thought they were better than global ones for certain sorts of information. Aside from the obvious reason, that much information is of local significance only, I could find just one other reason: people are very upset if they get seven million hits when they know that regional tools will return fewer results.

Well, as far as I can see there's no difference between seven million hits and seven thousand hits. You will never search through all of them in either case, so it's not worth worrying about. If the sites you want are not coming up in the first few pages of hits then either you or the search tool are doing something wrong. You have to work out a strategy or you'll end up wasting a lot of time.

Therefore, the introduction of regional versions of search tools seems to have had the effect of fragmenting results. They sometimes exclude sites that they shouldn't exclude. This is more of a reflection on the nature of search than a criticism of the search tools. What is and what is not relevant in results is often very much in the mind of the searcher. And it's hard to say what search tools could do to improve the situation. In the future the problem may be solved by XML or some form of metadata standard. But that still leaves the problem of what to do with sites that contain both types of information. Clearly, such sites should appear in both the regional and the global versions of search tools and this doesn't seem to be happening at present.

According to Duncan Parry, tools like WhoIs could be used to determine the location of a site server and decide from that the regional focus of a domain. "But this would only be helpful in a limited way in excluding sites from search engine databases," cautions Parry. "That doesn't even take into account the time and technology involved in automating this. I do wonder if some sort of meta tag should be made a HTML standard that specifies a country code (or global interest). Of course, this presents difficulties of enforcement, changing existing sites, etc."

On the basis of what I have found thus far, I will not be changing my surfing habits radically. I'll suspend judgement to some extent but I'll use the global versions of the major search tools most of the time. Whenever a search tool claims to be regionally biased I'll want to know what criteria they use to select sites and why I should believe that relevant material has not been excluded.