Do Google Search Results Differ by Location?

Do Google Search Results Change with Location?

Experiment date: 2025-09-03 • Countries tested: US, India, Japan, Brazil, Germany

Introduction

Question: If we type the same query into Google from different locations, do we get the same answers?

Short answer: No. Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) vary by many factors — location is a major one. For example, "best food" searched in Mumbai will return different results than the same query from Tokyo.

In this post I describe a small experiment: I ran the same queries from five countries, compared results using Jaccard similarity, and visualized the differences with heatmaps.

Experiment setup

I tested 5 countries and 9 queries grouped into three categories:

• Countries: United States, India, Japan, Brazil, Germany
• Query categories (3 each):
  • Neutral: climate change facts, latest AI research, mathematicians
  • Cultural: best food, cultural values, nationalist
  • Commercial: best laptop, study abroad programs, buy electronics online

All searches were performed on Google using SerpAPI. Each query-location pair used the top 10 organic results. The experiment metadata (timestamps, location, search IDs) is available here: metadata.csv.

Method: For each pair of locations we computed the Jaccard similarity of their top-10 result sets:

Jaccard = (A ∩ B) / (A ∪ B)

The result is a 5×5 symmetric matrix (locations × locations) for each query.

Results (high level)

Overall, the data shows location affects search results. The effect is strongest for Commercial and Cultural queries and weaker for Neutral queries.

Cultural queries — example: cultural values

Below is the heatmap of Jaccard similarity for the query cultural values. Higher values mean more overlap in the top-10 results between two countries.

Figure 1: Heatmap for cultural values (higher = more overlap). Japan shows noticeably different results compared to other countries.

Commercial queries — example: best laptop

Commercial queries like "best laptop" show much less overlap between countries — many results differ because country-specific retailers, local review sites, and regionally-preferred brands appear.

Figure 2: Heatmap for best laptop — less overlap across countries than cultural or neutral queries.

Notes: Results above are computed from only the top 10 results per location. Expanding to top-50 would give a fuller picture, but is slower and requires more careful de-duplication.

Conclusion

This simple experiment supports the common belief: Google SERPs vary significantly by location, especially for queries influenced by culture and commerce.

Next question: can location-based results introduce bias? I plan a follow-up experiment to explore that — stay tuned.

If you'd like the raw data or the scripts I used (including the code that produced the heatmaps), you can find them in the repository: GitHub.

View code & data on GitHub

Questions or ideas? Reply below or open an issue on the GitHub repo. Feel free to try your own query — the correlation changes a lot depending on what you search for.