Although Google by no means make up the whole of search, it constitutes a large part of it and plans to stay there. Recently we have seen Google making steps towards aggregating all of the content published on the web into one big system. You can now see Flickr photos in Google Maps results.

Does this look like that the web is world-wide? It does – but this doesn’t mean it is. The BBC iPlayer’s Terms and Conditions state, for example, that if you’re not in the UK, you can only listen to most of their radio programmes. Little consolation to the UK expats who would like to watch TV programmes.

Tony Ruscoe and Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped looked at what Google services are not available in all countries. We knew before that we cannot view some YouTube videos and channels in the UK (same is true for Google Videos). On other services, like DailyMotion, the sound is distorted. With some of the services being released for a trial in the U.S. first, this isn’t really a problem. It is even understandable why Google does so: even tested updates sometimes have glitches. Now that we have Twitter, imagine dealing with the worldwide real-time criticism of Google?

And yet if you are in Germany, you cannot even preview “The Comedies of William Shakespeare”. One would have thought that over 400 years since his birth, The Bard has not only become a household name, but his work has long been in the public domain. But this is evidently not true for his printed works. Or maybe this relates to comedies only. Perhaps Google Books is working hard to make us remember Shakespeare as the author of tragedies?

A mysterious Google Doodle from Google.com

Better still, Google Doodles are also not visible in all countries. In a way it makes sense, for doodles may celebrate days that are important for a specific country, thus differentiating between Google domains allows to celebrate several special dates, events or personalities. But today, for example, this is the Google Doodle you can see if you search Google.com. Unfortunately, it is only available on the page with the actual search results.