Why are some Google services not yet available in Albania?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Dardan Hasku in Kosovo. And the question was essentially, why does Google not support Albania at all? Mentioned a lot of stuff that isn’t supported, like maybe not advanced search on google.al. And closed with, does Google hate Albania? Which generated a pretty funny internal discussion thread. Because I pinged a few people. And I sort of abridged the question to, does Google hate Albania? And so there were comments on the internal doc like, no, we don’t hate Albania. And then the followup guy said, no, we love Albania, period. That said, there’s still some room for improvement. So we did launch google.al earlier in 2013. And in fact, I think we had a Google Doodle for the 100th day– Independence Day– late last year in 2012. So we are working on it. We’re trying to get better support for Albanian. But even though Google’s won a lot of prizes for having the most internationalized website in the world, there’s still a lot work that we need to go through to be able to make sure that we provide support for language in all kinds of areas. And the question mentioned Places and Advanced Search and Google News and that sort of thing. So there’s still work to be done. It’s not a deliberate slight. It’s not that we don’t like Albania. We like Albania a lot. It’s just it takes time to be able to support properties properly and give those languages all the support that they deserve. So thanks for this question very much. We’re going to use it to go ping and throw some guilt trips at other people within Google and see if we can push a little bit harder for Albanian support.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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