It might sound weird but I assume it's indeed the case. I am the webmaster of a Sandra Bullock website and I write it in German and English and host them on two different domains... sandrabullock.de is the German version sandra-bullock.co.uk is the English version I am at #1 at google.de since ~2-3 months with the German version but at google.com I am not even in the top 1000 search results for the keyword sandra bullock. My website exists since more than 2 years in these two versions tho. (the .de domain exists since 1997) to your information: the .de domain has a PR of 5 the .co.uk domain has a PR of 0 but it's identified by Google with the web page title when I lookup the domain so I think the site isn't blacklisted. The .co.uk domain was reachable through sandrabullock.ws until about 2 months ago when I changed domains vor various reasons. The sandrabullock.was has a 301 (permanently moved) forwarder to the .co.uk domain so google.com shouldn't blacklist my site for using two domains with the same content. Both domains also get a high amount of backlinks so I don't know why one site is perfectly ranked for the most relevant keyword sanra bullock and the other is not even listed. Yahoo! lists the German version place no1 for German pages and the English page in the Top 10. New MSN lists the English version as well in the Top 10. Lycos lists the English version even no.1. BBC (.co.uk) lists the site as recommended when doing a web search. So what's wrong with Google by not listing my site. I doubt there are more than 3-4 other sites with as much content about Sandy as mine and maybe 1 or 2 that are as up to date as mine (almost daily updates). Well any help or experiences in this direction would be great. Especially I'd like to know if there is anybody else who has a German and English version on two domains with such different results from google.de and google.com.
It's not uncommon to see different SERPs in google.com versus google/regional. This doesn't mean they use a different algorithm. It's primarily because the number of competitive results in the main vs. regional indices are different.