We are all familiar with the nondescript and Spartan Google home page. There are no bells or whistles that come with it just a logo, an input box and two buttons (one of which I never use). This is all well and good, really quite a simple and elegant way to enter the the world wide web. What I do not understand is why every other country in the world appears to have additional options on their page.

I noticed this when I saw Google searches form far far away places land on this site, when I followed each foreign search link they all had options to search pages for the entire web (by default) or just their particular country. I guess I am wondering why there is no "pages from the US" button at Google.com. It seems to be a reasonable request, or it may be that so much of the content comes from the US that having such a search option is pointless.

The same appears to be true for Live Search UK.