Google Mayday, Caffeine Boost or Total FLOP!

It's been a little over a month now that Google released it's Caffeine update otherwise known as Google "Mayday". Having been a little surprised by some of the search results and updates that were done with this major update to Google's look and feel and it's algorithms, I decided to give it a while before commenting.
Now that the algorithms have settled according to Matt Cutts, I can start telling you why I think this Google update is a total FLOP!

Being an SEO company whose clientel base are mostly South African companies, we've seen a massive drop in search volume across board. The reason being, well Google has decided to take away the "pages from south africa" search option from the Google.co.za home page. WHY??????

Problems with this:
1. Online users in South Africa, still don't follow global search trends. Generic search terms are more widely used, long tail is not wide spread hence this becomes a problem. Why?

a. People when shopping search for "batman dvd box set".
b. People when looking for a service search for "insurance brokers".

DO YOU SEE THE TREND?

This means, without a local search option from the home page, the first search results you will get from Google is a mixture of LOCAL and GLOBALLY (well seo'd) sites.

This is poor show for Google, people will start getting irritated, those that don't mind will either see the "pages from south africa" search on the left side, or advanced users will try something along the lines of a localised search query i.e. "batman dvd box set shopping site south africa".

This once again poses a problem for South African companies and majority of SEO companies in South Africa, actually haven't a clue as to how to SEO, which means corporate companies are going to be paying through their ASSES for SEO and not be found...

And this means South Africans are goign to get CRAP results.
See
2. People in South Africa when searching for products, services, shopping etc don't want pages that are out of South Africa, why would they?

My first example "batman dvd box set" gives 10 sites - NOT ONE OF WHICH is a South African shopping site?????? This means, that majority of South Africans will follow the process of buying the DVD boxset from an overseas site, wasting their time when they find out they have to pay more for shipping from Amazon than the actual product price itself. (BING, here's your chance to takeover localised search)

So, If you ask me!!! For localised search (which was meant to be the way forward) Google's taken a step backwards. REMEMBER, the rest of the world has not had the search volume or the infrastructure in place to become advanced internet users. I hope Google reads this!!!!!