Globally operating search engines, such as Google, usually have a separate index for each market. This means that, for example, there is a Google Index for US (google.com), a Google Index for Japan (google.co.jp) etc. Having national indexes helps the search engine tailor results to the search behavior (including but not limited to language) of each market. This provides a more reliable information resource that is more closely related to what users in the country are looking for. An inferior alternative approach would be to base results on what would be a universal index, including data from all markets, but this would make it impossible to meet the specific needs of users in each country.

« Back to Glossary Index