Google.be Equals Google.nl ?
I’ve been looking for a disclaimer on the Belgian site, to see if maybe they had changed it too regarding the fuzz about the change of mission on the dotcom. What I’ve found is an abandoned, starving website. Tune in and be amazed.
* The doodle page stopped listing items in june 2005. The birthday logo of Frank Lloyd Wright - 8th of June 2005 is the same one as the one from Leonardo Da Vinci on the 15th of April 2005. Don’t tell me you’ve got some monkeys working over there that never even check this page???
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/holidaylogos.html
* Help : there’s no help disclaimer as on the dotcom. Help hasn’t been updated since 2003.
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/help.html
* press releases stopped in march 2005 (the only one for that year), no news in 2004, 2 press releases in 2003.
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/press/index.html
(not a word on their news service being available in Dutch as I’ve posted)
* The Zeitgeist in the sidebar is still for November 2005, listing items as Sinterklass, (which needs to be sinterklaas, the holy man that comes deliver toys on December 6th)
* The technology overview has a 2003 copyright on the bottom of the page.
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/press/overview_tech.html
* The business overview too.
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/press/overview_biz.html
* Point three of the funfacts says google crawls over 3 billion pages. Umm… technically it’s correct, but isn’t that an understatement?
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/press/funfacts.html
* Point 7 of that same page talks about 1000 employees for Google. It’s much more by now, I presume.
CSS styles for the footer? Seems to me they edit it by hand.
* Press center : Google in the news… ends in 2003. Although the domain name is .be, all the urls are .nl (Netherlands) seems no one in Belgium has ever written about them.
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/press/press.html
* The statistics, apart from being from 2003, show stats for the Netherlands, although I live in Belgium.
http://www.google.be/intl/nl/press/metrics.html
Up to dateness : 5% , Localness: 0% Relevancy? None.
Compared to the dotcom, this is just pathetic!? What are the Belgian Googlers being paid for? Lame public relations? Give me this job and I’ll make it happen withing a week ! Hell, I could even do this in my 20% time ! This is the utter example of online decay. I’m actually surprised they dare to call it Google Belgium.
What can I say… it’s true. They really should be ashamed about it. The duplicate google doodle shocked me a bit, like who would make such a stupid mistake?! Damn it
Comment by Laurent Van Winckel | January 29, 2006
Yeah! Frustration ventilation time! Finally!
Well done Coolz0r, but I don’t think it will make much of a difference.
For your amusement try this: replace .be in the domain name with any arbitrary country TLD, like NL, FR, DE, SK — even COM — and you will get the same results. Funny isn’t it? So, it is not so much the Belgian *site*, as it is the Dutch language pages that are Google’s cinderellas…
Comment by menneke | January 29, 2006
On the .com I count 22 logos. No duplicate ones.
On the .fr, all pages are copyrighted 2005, including help.
On the fr, de and com the press center had 2004 articles.
It IS the Belgian site that runs hopelessly behind.
And Google.nl = Google.be, except for the difference in the url, they contain the exact same pages, including all the 2003 copyrights.
http://www.google.nl/intl/nl/holidaylogos.html even contains the duplicate doodle.
I’ll tell you even more, Google Belgium doesn’t even exist, because
http://www.google.nl/intl/nl/contact.html and http://www.google.be/intl/nl/contact.html
are exactly the same. If I want to contact Google from Belgium, I have to call internationally to The Netherlands.
I stick with my points, except I now expand them to the Dutch site too.
Comment by Coolz0r | January 29, 2006
Coolz0r, I think you misread my instructions: I said replace .be in the domain name with any other TLD. Only “.be”.
Go to http://www.google.fr/intl/nl/help.html, it returns the exact same page as http://www.google.be/intl/nl/help.html. Or as http://www.google.com/intl/nl/help.html for that matter.
All these domains point to one of two addresses! For instance, the IP addres 216.239.37.99 is used for the TLDs .com, .be, .nl, .sk, .it, .pt and 216.239.37.104 for the TLDs .fr, .se, .de, .fi, .es, .pl, .co.uk, .com.gr, .dk. There’s only 2 sites (in the same C-segment IP addressing!) and they are probabaly running on just one machine or they are replicated between 2 machines with those 2 IP addresses. In any case the Dutch language pages are present on each and every one of them (just like all the other language pages) and they are completely similar on all of them. It is only the Dutch language, I’m telling you!
Comment by menneke | January 30, 2006
Indeed, you’re right ! I misunderstood, I replaced the two letters after the /intl/ too.
I don’t know what to think of this on first sight. I’m still amazed about the lameness of the content-builders…
Thanks for the tip !
Comment by Coolz0r | January 30, 2006
The same happened with their dutch version of gmail. While the english version had a continious counter on the front page, the dutch version had a static more than 2gig statement. Both for the same mailbox.
Comment by Nick | January 31, 2006
And the winnar of the best website 2004 and 2005 in Belgium is … www.google.be ….
Amazing that in this country a site who actually don’t exist is the site of the year.
It says enough about the country Belgium …
Compared with the Netherlands we are having here now the beginning of the internet. And then you must now that the Netherlands isn’t the top in Europe and compared with other countries we are living here now in the year … 1950?
Comment by Lesj | February 2, 2006