A Question about Competition Analysis

Hi all,

I kind of asked this question before on another thread but i had some extra questions and id really appreciate some help as its stopping me moving forwards with doing anything on the internet.

My issue is, when i look at the competition for my selected keyword on google, google sends me results that are biased towards the location i live in. Which is a completely different market to the "global monthly searches" data i gathered in my keyword research. And i dont want a local search as i live in Ireland which is a tiny country/search volume.

Somebody helpfully pointed out i can do a search on google.com/ncr. But i am unsure if this is a good gauge of what the real competition is?

Also, as another quick question, if i were to try and rank highly in a local search i.e for people searching in the same country as me would a .com extension rank higher than a country specific extension when buying domain names?

Can you rank highly in another countries search if you are not based in that country?

Sorry for so many questions

Tom