Some final (I hope) remarks on the topic of how Google searches are restricted by country.

The reason I have had so many entries on Google recently is because some German sites pointed out that we could no longer access the US google.com in Germany (and I suspect that’s still true but am not sure) and they were writing about it only in German. I put it there in English in case anyone wanted to read that.

Further information on the bizarrely high number of results for „santa cruz“ (no inverted commas): 270,000-odd results in Germany, over 2 million in the USA (of course, we discovered that only 998 results are ever really shown), 220,000 in France, according to a colleague in France, who adds:
‚My brother in Lusaka, Zambia, gets 2.6 + million hits, and so does a nephew in India and a friend in Taiwan’.
And a colleague in the UK got 2.63 m for Santa Cruz and 2.49 m. for „Santa Cruz“!
I have not investigated whether the capital letters make any difference.The ‚more intelligent’ search on „ascension day“ with inverted commas produced very similar results in Germany and the USA. The only really big figure in the USA turned out to be the work of someone who didn’t read the instructions properly and omitted the inverted commas.

Searching on santa cruz with no inverted commas, OK, I know it’s a stupid example, since who would ever search for it without inverted commas, which tell Google to search for a precise combination of words – well, anyone who knows Google and wants to see the latest story and knows they can rely on the search – my original search was actually:
santa cruz „blue ice“
and it did the trick.

Google’s new (beta) toolbar (whichchas more features than the old one) permits searching in google.com, google.de and I think about 70 other possibilities. This feature is not of much interest to me.