Starting last August Google began showing suggestions as you type letters into the search box on their home page.  Starting yesterday they took on a local flavor and the results Google suggests are now determined by where in the world you are.  For examplein Portland the US when you type in, port, Google Suggests  shows you this:

But if you’re in the U.K.  you might see:

In announcing the international launch of Google Suggest Google states “We’ve localized our suggestions to account for various cultural and local factors…”  they go on to say that “users in different countries will get suggestions that feel natural.”

With any luck this is only the start of the improvements they will be making to this feature which they launched back in August.    While Google says it has “localized” the suggestions what they’ve really done is internationalized the suggestions to not be so US centric.  No doubt this is a move in the right direction, but hopefully they won’t stop here.    Google could and should offer true localization to narrow the geographical reach of these results to a much smaller area.  Dreaming a little bit further it would be great if Google added the ability through a drop down to narrow search on a country, state or city level.