Geo-location, Google, and you
Posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 4:07pm. #
It’s been a manic week. Five days in Singapore, and then two nights in Paris. And I’ve still a flight to head office in Glasgow, then a weekend in Dublin to come. I’ve made quite a few blog posts, but if I’ve learnt anything from Martin Belam, it’s to stagger their release. So I’ll be doing that. In my cheesy radio voice: “Stay tuned for a post about Marty, and a post about my new ChiPod! Don’t touch that, er, browser!”
Until the channel tunnel cut off my mobile phone signal, I’ve spent the last half-hour catching up on my RSS feeds, courtesy of Google Reader (for mobile). The last post I read was Matt Cutts posting about Google, using human input to tweak search results). Which set me thinking.
While in Singapore, I was doing a lot of work on the joint presentation Nick and I made; and did a lot of Google searches to back up the information we were using. One such search was launch of dab radio which I punched into the Firefox search without a second thought. It returned information of the launch of DAB digital radio, as you’d expect.
But it returned MediaCorp’s launch of DAB in Singapore. Not the UK launch many years before.
And it struck me that this was perhaps one reason why Google was doing so well. I’ve been oblivious to it for a while, but a search on google.com within the UK gives you UK-biased results. And a search on google.com within Singapore gives you Singaporean-biased results.
I’ve been talking for a long while here about relevant advertising being the way forward. Google’s delivering that - but also delivering relevant content too, depending where you are and what you’re doing.
It reminds me that I ought to be doing geo-location stuff on mediauk.com to add correct dialling codes. Better get onto that. When I’m not so tired. And boy, am I tired.
