Is there an advantage to using google.com rather than google.com.au as my search engine in Chrome?

Question

I'm an Australian living in Thailand. I use Google Chrome as my primary web browser. Out-of-the-box, Chrome's combined address bar/search box will return results from google.co.th. That's fine but not optimal as my Thai literacy is fairly poor. Therefore I change my default search engine to google.com.au.

My question is: Should I instead be using google.com?

My two main concerns are that:

• I may be missing out on some information by using the Australian engine
• I may be getting slightly slower or faster search results (especially with Google Instant) depending on which engine I use

The types of searches I do are generally 'global' in nature (stuff about *nix, music, world events, etc.).

Answer 1

if you use any country engine of Google it will try to relate your search to that locality.it depend on search query if the results will be same or a little different.

So if your query is global in nature you should use Google.com. but if you want to relate your query to your locality and want that Google bias your result a little you can use .au.

Speed is not a problem with any prefix you add with google search engine.

Answer 2

In my expereience there are minor differences between the page rankings of results between them, so while the results as a whole are very similar some links will appear on the front page in .au but not in .com.

Speed of results will really depend on your internet connection but when overseas i have not really noticed a difference between different versions of the site.

If you are generally looking for more 'global' results and don't need a paticular .au bias then you probably are best of sticking with the .com (conversly though while more 'global' it will also contain more US centric results :)

Answer 3

Speed is not a problem with any suffix you add with Google search engine. The speed comes from your overall internet speed. Google.com.au is actually based in Ireland, mainly for tax purposes, so you are not really any closer to there than the United States.