Lately I've noticed that google.nl not only has a dutch interface, but favours dutch pages. In other words, the results I see are not only based on pagerank, but also on the language.

In my opinion, this is wrong. Even though the pages are in my native language, that does not mean they are more relevant to my search than international pages. I'd rather have 10 good international links on top, than 2 bogus dutch ones.

For example, a search on 'php' on google.nl gives me dutch results on the first page, that are a lot less interesting than the results I get for the same query on the . com site. And that is without using the 'search for pages in dutch' option. It's just the default.

I'm not sure if this is something that has always been there but I simply didn't notice before, or if this is a change in the pagerank algorithm. Given the number of times I've noticed it lately, I suspect the latter.

For now, I've set the default home in all my browsers to the .com version (I also had to change a setting at google to prevent it from keeping redirecting me to the .nl version).