It is very common for businesses as successful as Google to innovate their practises in order to stay ahead of the competition. Most of the time, when people are changing their products and services they like to announce it long before it happens. This is to create excitement amongst their customers and therefore gain more popularity for the business as a whole.

However, people have started noticing Google has changed the way it’s going about their procedures. One of these ways is how they label country services across various platforms, internet used on the phone and on desktops as well as the Google app. The change itself was meant to positively affect local users navigating the search engine who can come across local information specific to the country they are in.

Despite not getting much attention, the change by Google made in October 2017, was referenced and acknowledged via a statement from Google clarifying “ the choice of country service will no longer be indicated by domain. Instead, by default, you’ll be served the country service that corresponds to your location.” This followed with the succeeding example “ So if you live in Australia, you’ll automatically receive the country service for Australia, but when you travel to New Zealand, your results will switch automatically to the country service for New Zealand. Upon return to Australia, you will seamlessly revert back to the Australian country service. ”

Surely, this new feature for Google’s country services is more convenient and is a massive improvement on the function before. The feature was basically a bit messy as there were duplicates of web pages and when Google merged or ‘folded’ these web pages, the only web page available had the possibility of being in an entirely different language which is not very helpful as the purpose of this language function is to give information and you can’t understand what’s being presented to you if you can’t understand the language it is written in.

To rectify this, Google has streamlined the function, taking on the ‘quality over quantity’ attitude by “folding” the content as referenced by Google Trends analyst, John Mueller.

It could be considered that, in the end, it has worked out for the best as they have fixed their service feature, especially now it’s even more convenient for users travelling to different countries.

https://searchengineland.com/google-changed-the-way-it-works-and-no-one-really-noticed-300213