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For Amazon and other massive sites, they have both .com and .co.uk is because they are targeting different people from different locations with tthe site.  The .com domain is targeting people in the US and .co.uk is for people in UK.  Therefore, when people search for Amazon, the .com domain will be the one that appears in search engine while the .co.uk domain will appear in the results for people in UK searching for Amazon. If you want to rank better in Google.com, then you can create a .com domain and for .co.uk you can create a new website with the .uk ccTLD or create a subfolder within your .com domain geotargeting UK.

ojwilliams8 I think, given the info from Matt Cutts at SXSW (Check it here) I do not see them gaining any advantage in Local. Given that local should have its own page and that needs unique content, given that while they have a location there with nothing to go with it, given that links from the footer are devalued, Then I do not see them gaining an advantage. The competitor's approach is bad. For each city/township you desire to improve local for, you need a separate page with its own content. I really think there will ultimately be a penalty or a loss of any value for this very soon. Best,