Does Google localize its search results?

Help me test Google please.

1. Where are you (geographically)? You can post anonymously if you don't want to reveal your location.

2. Google solutions. Just the word solutions. Is the first result www.solutions-stores.ca? If not, what do you get?

3. Google the unicorn. No quotation marks, but make sure you get the the in there. Is the first result www.theunicornpub.com? If not, what is it?

Why am I asking this? Because those two searches worked for me, producing exactly what I was looking for as the first search result, even though they seem far too vague to work. But those two businesses are also located right in my very neighbourhood. So is Google a pure genius, or is it a genius because it's localizing search results?

Why do I care if it's localizing as long as it's producing results? Because localization is great for normals under normal circumstances, but it's a real PITA for translation research. If I'm trying to confirm terminology or phraseology, I need my results to be neutral.

We already know that it localizes linguistically, which is problematic for translation research. If I'm using English-language Google (which I do by default beause it's both my and Google's first language) and I google an expression that contains a French word that's spelled the same in English, it will favour English results. (Elephant in English Google, elephant in French Google And yes, Google is supposed to be diacritic-blind.) As a translator, I find this problematic because it's more likely to lead me to use calques or faux amis. As a lazy Anglophone I find this problematic because I have a poor memory for diacritics and prefer to type on an English keyboard like I originally learned to type on, so sometimes I like to google up a foreign-language word without diacritics then copy-paste the proper spelling into my text. (This is especially useful with Polish, because my computer won't do all the Polish diacritics.)

I did send Google a feedback about this, but I don't know if it will help. Linguistic and geographical localization are still helpful to normals, even if they are problematic for translation research. But then again, I sent Google a feedback a while back asking for multilingual Google News search results (which, again, are generally not useful to normals) and now that option is there.