Are Google results a proxy for people's interest en a certain country? Where is your website?

Google wants to catalogue humanity's knowledge (or lack thereof, I would say) and make it available to everyone at anytime and in any place. With so much talk about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, etc., I was curious to see how many natural results does Google.com serve for the term Canada (results will vary depending on the Google domain extension, but .com is the largest - e.g. the term Canada - selecting pages in Spanish - on the Google.com.mx portal serves only 2,930,000 results - Canada en Español.com ranking third) . But this lead me to quickly search for other countries in order to compare. I googled Canada, United States, Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, Japan and China. #1 in the number of results served? Nope, not the US, certainly not Canada. It was France with over one Billion results. Here's the results of the search (15 Nov 07):

1. France - 1,140,000,000
2. Japan - 811,000,000
3. Mexico - 730,000,000
4. China - 690,000,000
5. Canada - 648,000,000
6. United States - 644,000,000
7. Spain - 522,000,000
8. Italy - 513,000,000

Of course, results are constantly changing as Google's bots add or eliminate sites from the results, but clearly there are significant differences in the number of results from one country term to another.

Saludos,
Jaime