Luxembourg related sites only please mister google

Finding what you are looking for on the internet by using google is not always easy in small countries. Luxembourg is a good example. Let’s have a closer look.

>> Scenario: I am a french-speaker who lives in Luxembourg and I want to look at car insurance prices online <<

First Try: I go to google and search for ‘assurance voiture’ (car insurance in french). Only 2 of the first 10 google results are actually linking to sites that are suited for Luxembourg residents. All other results are made for the french market only. If we look closer at these two sites that are relevant for Luxembourg residents, we will see that they are both .lu web sites.

Second Try: I make the same search in google, but this time I add site:.lu to my search criteria – this tells google to only look for sites that have the Luxembourg top level domain .lu. The search therefore looks like this: ‘assurance voiture site:.lu’. Look at the results now – every result relates to Luxembourg and is suitable for Luxembourg residents that are looking for car insurance.

Note that it is not always the case that ‘site:.lu’ will give you better results. You can also have .com .net etc sites that targets Luxembourg. When using site:.lu, all other top level domains are ruled out by google as you ask google to only look for .lu sites. I hope that makes sense to you.

You will find that as your search criteria gets closer to something you can buy online, you will get more non-Luxembourg related results. This is because companies that sell online optimize their websites so that they are better indexed in google. This is also called ‘search engine optimization’ or ‘SEO’. As Luxembourg is such a small market, sites from larger neighboring countries can sometimes dominate the search results you get. So next time you get search results that don’t relate to Luxembourg, try to add site:.lu. You might find what you are looking for quicker.

1 Comment

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  mistermaumau January 26, 2011 at 09:11

  all very well but why do you think google would limit such a search to .lu domains unless they consciously decided that people in Lux would not be wanting to compare with offers from abroad (do you really think Google realises that “officially” you have to buy insurance in Lux), after all, many people using google.lu would be happy if when searching “Bargain fiat punto” it would lead to an exporter in Denmark offering 20% off new prices.
  Personally I find it pretty pointless to have a google search site for each country, if you want to search for Lux. use google .com and type “assurance voiture luxembourg”, Google.com stocks far more results than individual country sites and besides I hate the way sites like google, yahoo will “force” their choice of country site on you by “spying” on your geographic location or language use (the advertising they carry is also geared to optimise this knowledge). It is not because I am travelling in France or writing in french that I am interested in seeing google or yahoo france instead of .com or .co.uk If I was just surfing anonymously, I could forgive them but even when logged in with a user/e-mail name they still expect you’re more interested in the local site than the one you are registered with and visit 99% of the time (as per those records they keep of your surfing).