I am sure you have seen a .UK at the end of a website address. That is because of the country specific nature of the site. Google for example, has a bunch of country specific search engines. For example Google.com.au or Google.fr/ Below are some tips to help you narrow down your searches from a global level to a more manageable set of results. The big three make up the bulk of the article, but there is a list of different localized search engines.

Bing

If you use Bing to search, a great option to narrow your search is using an operator to soley search in your region of interest. For example, if you wanted to search for something in Australia, you could add “[loc:AU]” to the end of your search query. Bing would then only search for results in that country. Here is a monster list of the country codes. It is from their help archives. I couldn’t find a direct link so click on the country and region codes table for all of the available choices.

Another search trick with Bing is to add a little bit of code to the completed query. Try adding “[?cc=fr]” to the Bing URL so it would look like this www.bing.com?cc=fr

Google

Search giant Google lets you search in different countries couple different ways. The first I mentioned above. Simply add “[.AU]” or what ever country abbreviation for the country you would like to search. The other option is to add a little bit of code “[&gl=uk]” to the end of a completed search. The “gl” is for Google Location. Here is a before and after example Before:

After:

Yahoo

Yahoo is a little different than the other two. Yahoo offers a country search option in the advance search options.

Yahoo also has a page that directs you to the search engine page for the country of your choice; there are 41 to choose from. Here is a link to the Yahoo International page.

Local Search Engines

The last option I’m going to mention is local search engines. There are a lot of local search engines who will search the local pages. These pages might be business searches in a certain city, or just a local telephone or address search. Having access to these will help you sift through the possibilities and really narrow in your search results. Most larger cities are bound to have a search engine or two like this. This site has a pretty large list of search engines by country. It does not look like it has been updated in a while, but it will give you somewhere to start. Do you know any ways to narrow your search to a country or even a city level? Image credit Si1very