What country specific content?

It’s the first time I noticed it, although it’s probably been there forever- the humble watermark that sits in the search box on the Google Analytics Support page:

It indicates the language that you are likely to be searching with, using the "custom search".

What’s odd is that when I’ve logged out of Analytics the search box contains a Cyrillic alphabet watermark:

Before I log in it displays a UK one:

What’s odder is that the URL of the Cyrillic one is:
http://www.google.com/coop/intl/uk/images/google_custom_search_watermark.gif
and the UK one’s is:
http://www.google.com/coop/intl/en/images/google_custom_search_watermark.gif
…the only difference is the country identifier being replaced with a language identifier (uk or en).

I’d love to know to how or why this happens. Of more interest to me is whether it is a reflection of, or a hint at, how truly difficult it is to serve country-specific content.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 5:05 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.