My Geekdom

I happen to be spending a week at my parents' house. Very nice, but I hate their pillows. At home I have some pillows my wife bought me from IKEA that I like very much. I decided to buy some for my folks but couldn't remember the name "IKEA". All I could come up with was that it was some Swedish store (it was late and I don't really do names very well). So I typed "swedish store" into Google and got this response (you can enlarge the picture by clicking on it):

If you notice, halfway down the page Google says "See results for IKEA" and inserts three results for IKEA into the middle of the search. At first glance this might seem like a simple thing to implement but I don't quite think so. I bet if I was in Sweden it would not single out IKEA. Obviously the Google search engine has information about what Swedish stores are common in America or at least commonly searched for and knew that I wasn't in Sweden (there is more on this at the end of this entry). Maybe this was a sponsored link (i.e.: an advertisement) although, last I read, Google kept sponsored links to the top of the page and the right and clearly labeled them as sponsored. Even if it was a sponsored link, it was exactly what I needed, where I needed it, and when I needed it. It was simply wonderful.

Thinking it was so great, I went and did the same for Yahoo! and, while it's search page did include IKEA as a result, (the store's name), it did it with so much less finesse (you can enlarge the picture by clicking on it):

I wondered how this was done as I was pretty certain that searching for "swedish store" in Google in Sweden would produce different results. I was actually pretty certain that Google was backtracking my location via my IP address (unless you are using an anonymizer it is pretty easy to track a web request back to the ISP and the general vicinity (e.g.: town/city or perhaps county) which the user is in). I mentioned this to my friend Chris Shabsin¹ and he said that he suspected it had more to do with the fact that I was using Google.com (the US version) and not Google.se, the Swedish entry point for Google. When I verified that this was correct I tried accessing Google.com from remote countries. I used a couple of different anonymizers that were running in different countries and saw that Google.com always produced the same results, no matter what country I entered from. This made me happy as, while I know that Google tracks lots of information about me, I was uncomfortable with the thought that they were customizing searches based on IP addresses. I'm glad their not.

1. Chris has recently joined Google but the information in our discussion about how Google worked was not based on any information he has learned since joining it. It was strictly supposition. That was why I had to test it to confirm. I am greatly obliged to Chris for suggesting that I investigate further before posting.