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Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”
Kevin Murphy,
April 15, 2025, 17:03:27 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Google is going to stop using country-code TLDs for its web sites around the world.
The company said today that “country-level domains are no longer necessary” because it’s become so good at localization that it doesn’t need to have search users visit their local ccTLD domain to figure out where they are.
All of its ccTLD sites will start redirecting to google.com over the coming months, Google said in a blog post. The only impact users will see is having to re-enter search preferences, it said.
The move is a bit of a blow, albeit a bearable one, to ccTLD registries, which will no longer have their brand associated with the internet’s most-popular web service. Google.com is already the most-visited domain in the world.
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Incredible news!
Google is on the contrary terribly bad at providing geolocalized results.
I am a French living in Spain and often travelling. I use Google for work, mostly looking for French results, which I could only more or less obtain with Google.fr. It was not good, but I guess it will be even worse with only Google.com
I guess we’ll have to see what they do with their search preferences.
Finally! It was getting a bit wild with all those ccTLDs (you’ll experience this while travelling abroad); users were bouncing around like a global ping-pong match, all landing on the same Google anyway.
Now, with their classic .com at the helm, Google can serve up those same geo-based search results without the redirect rollercoaster.
Clean, simple, and way less confusing IMHO!
Again the arrogance of US big tech. They will decide for you. In 5 years, nobody will use this bloated search engine anymore. The world is to LLMs.
A question arises concerning multilingual or multi-country sites.
How will they handle this?
Cookies? I have no idea.