A further discussion in the FLEFO Forum at CompuServe (I’ve been a member since 1994 and it’s where I first learned how useful it was to contact other translators all over the world) confirms that those using google.com in the USA get far more results than those in Europe. One colleague in Germany managed to reproduce this by dialling in via a CompuServe number in the USA. However, she said that although Google announces a large number of results, it will show only about 1000. Thus for Santa Cruz (no inverts):
Results shown ‘in Europe’ 991 – 998 of about 254,000
Results shown ‘in the USA’ 991 – 997 of about 2,670,000One member says the number of results can be changed by changing the preferred language in your browser. I couldn’t confirm this.
We also did a search on “ascension day” (with inverts), which was very silly of me as it was not Ascension Day (Christi Himmelfahrt) yesterday but Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi). European results were about 29,000, but at least one in America got 393,000