[Search-l] Wikia - Global focus or country level search?

[peter burden]

John McCormac wrote:
> Will Wikia have an more US focus with .com/net/org/biz/info being the 
> primary search targets? Or will each country have its own SE as in the 
> "pages from $country" thing with Google etc? Has such a question been 
> considered or is it way down the list?
>
>   
This suggests that it is possible, accurately, to determine the country 
of a web-site.
This isn't possible. Neither DNS nor IP block based geo-coding will 
deliver the information
for a variety of reasons. And should a national SE ignore global 
content? If I (in England)
am searching for a restaurant, I'm clearly not interested in those in 
Seattle, but if I'm
searching for information about a computing problem, I really am 
interested in what
a certain company in the Seattle area might have to say.

Identifying the language of a WWW page seems a reasonable task however 
and such
information should be part of the metadata saved for every known page. 
Character
codings should not be a big problem either, a decision at this stage to 
convert
all incoming text (including HTML entities) to something such as UTF-8 will
repay dividends and shouldn't prove expensive or contentious.
> Regards...jmcc
>