Amidst the brouhaha over whether Google can display news headlines from Belgium, here's some evidence that some Belgians actually welcome attention from the search engine. Netlash, a Belgian Web design firm, has discovered that Google's search results vary not just depending on the country of the searcher, but also on the country where the servers are based.

Netlash believes that Google examines the Internet addresses of websites to determine their physical location. You might have a Belgian Web site with an address that ends in ".be," but if the server's actually hosted in the Netherlands, it won't rank highly when Belgian surfers look for it on Google.

Why does Google go to the bother of filtering servers by country? Besides trying to deliver better search results to surfers, Google's also trying to please advertisers, who, even in this age of globalization, usually want to reach a specific national audience.