Someone else mentioned this on Matt Cutts blog. They are seeing a site hosted in Germany appearing in the pages from the UK.

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Ok one of mine (dcusnowboarding.com), Irish site, Irish tarageted but on a .com hosted in texas apears number one on pages form Ireland for ages now at year I'd say maybe more.

Explain that!

dcu snowboarding - Google Search

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Looks like we have another "anomaly", is there a map somewhere on the site Frodo?

Only 5 results, but still showing for pages from Ireland.

Two commonalities with both sites highlighted - use of google applications which probably dial home with visitor info. Maps, and Adsense / GCS.

Maybe using visitor info to determine where a site is from?

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"Maybe using visitor info to determine where a site is from?"

Too iffy IMO, G would require something more "trustworthy" ....

True

Imagine backlinks are a likely factor in this.
The Cork site prominently displayed a local address also...

Worth watching...

I would think Google takes pretty much everything you could imagine into account when ranking sites (locally and otherwise), not just big things like the domain name and hosting location but all the little things too. Meaning it's probably possible for every website to appear in any local search. Nearly all aspects can be gamed in one way or another (even domains and hosting locations) so I don't think they would really dismiss much. They obviously have to take a huge broad range of factors into account when ranking sites and they can't be narrow minded and just list .ie's and sites hosted in Ireland in the Irish results and just the same with other local searches.

Of course it's obvious having a .ie will pretty much guarantee inclusion in the Irish results but there will always be people who don't know this and will create, for example, a .com site hosted anywhere in the world that has content related to Ireland. It could be a great site that's of great interest to Irish people and Google I imagine wouldn't want to exclude it. Another example could be a German person setting up a .de(?) site again hosted anywhere but about his fathers Irish history or something. It's going to be much harder for the sites to rank locally but still possible.

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I was thinking that when I seen the DCU, boards.ie links etc.

I gave the local address a thought but my site also has local addresses but does not appear in the pages from Ireland.

The maps did spring to mind, its something that I don't have.

Excellent point Tom, totally agree. The keywords that I target could do with better sites in the pages from Ireland results. For the most part its badly targeted results.

"It could be a great site that's of great interest to Irish people and Google I imagine wouldn't want to exclude it." True enough, but they could do that in the "web search" results without necessarily including it in the PFI ones. Up to now they've been very strict with entry conditions to PFI, if they were to broaden entry it would need to be based on something difficult to game, and whois/links/addresses/traffic just won't fit that bill IMO.

I've never taken the term "pages from Ireland" too literally (as in hosted there, or .ie), I would think of it more as "put more Irish focus on my search". If this is the reality maybe they should rename it. Of course we're used to seeing .ie's populate the results for these searches and so it should be the case, but if it was too literal and rigid and didn't leave the door ajar for other possibilities I think it would be a bad thing for Google search.

Generally when I do an Irish related search I don't want it to just list .ie's or Irish hosted sites, I want it to give me all Irish related websites (most people who never heard of seo or know the difference between .com/.ie probably want and expect the same), .ie's will usually rank highest anyway, again as they should, but if there's a us hosted .com it must be a relevant site to get there (if Google's doing it's job properly) and is probably even run by someone in Ireland.

For a really strict search the advanced search options are there and I think you can put .ie in the domain to limit it to just .ie domains. Not really much point though because it's mostly all .ie's that come up for pfi anyway.

As for what determines eligibility and ranking in local searches, the obvious things like links, domain, hosting and content I reckon all play a part, with a ton of other less obvious stuff too, most likely.