Google’s iPhone search not doing any geo-targeting?
While digging around a little bit into the various mobile versions of Google (and other large sites), I found their iPhone version. They also have a version at google.co.uk.
Now, I don’t have an iPhone 
but I have changed my user agent to mimic the iPhone and done a few searches on there. It appears that the UK version isn’t doing any geo-targeting (but this might be because I’m not really using an iPhone so it can’t work out where I am).
I searched for [ebay] (and a few other major brands) on the UK version of iPhone Google and the results were all related to the US websites (unlike the results under most mobile versions of Google).
Localisation is even more important than normal with mobile search, so this surprised me a little. Does anyone have a UK iPhone? Can you verify my results?
If you have enjoyed this post you can subscribe to the rss feed to read more about how you can monitor and protect your brand online
Comment link
elstob on Thu (7 Feb) @ 12:39 pm
Hey Will,
Just checked this on my iPhone and your findings are the same as mine. No localization in effect at all. Seems a little odd but the iPhone specific page was probably just knocked up by an engineer over lunch so doesn’t surprise me too much.
That said the inbuilt search in Safari goes to the google.co.uk SERPS so they’re not completely off the ball
Comment link
Will Critchlow on Thu (7 Feb) @ 12:43 pm
Thanks Dave.
I’m not too worried about this - I think most iPhone users are using either grown-up google or some kind of iGoogle platform. I was just a little surprised since this seems to be designed for the iPhone…
Thanks for checking it out so quickly though (any excuse to use the shiny gadget, right?).