Changes afoot on Country specific Google?

[MrBig]

Noticed some interesting changes on Google .co .uk recently. Sites hosted in the UK or with co.uk TLDs would perform a lot higher on a "Pages from the UK" search than a "web" search in the past. And the ""Web"" search on Google.co.uk used to more or less mirror the standard Google.com searches.
Now noticing some UK hosted sites are appearing high for "web" search on Google.co.uk, but dropping five , six, seven pages on a "pages from UK" search, however. Google.com search is also now pretty different to a Google.co.uk search.
Does anyone using the co.uk or other Googles (.ca, .fr, .de .ie etc) notice similar or have a theory?
We were wondering if it was relecting the hosting location of incoming links to the site, or maybe non-UK tld.s are losing popularity in "UK only" search.