If, for example, someone is in South Africa and searches for "cake recipes" or "cheap hotels" it makes sense that Google will offer local sites, i.e. sites ending in the CO.ZA extension. Simple reason would be that the Google system assumes a South African site will have more relevant information for someone searching for info in South Africa.

Are the search results global or local by default? In my experience, unless you specifically set your Google settings to global, default would be local, with an option to "go to Google.com".

In your case, if someone in Belgium (if I'm not mistaken with the .BE extension) searches for info, your site might come up - if the search was in English.

To sum up: I *think* for SEO and organic traffic purposes it's not a smart move to go for a local, or country-specific, extension. Branding is another matter. If your URL looks good in a brandable way with the unusual extension, it might still be worth it.

As a rule, Google does give more weight/priority, for some search-terms, to sites they've deemed to be "locally relevant" (i.e. targeted to / residing in the same country from which a search originates), but the results will not be limited to sites from that country unless the user specifically requests so.

Even so, Google considers more than just the domain/ccTLD to determine geographic relevance. It also looks at backlink sources and considers where the site itself is hosted. For example, I have a .me (Montenegro) domain that is hosted in the UK, and I still rank highly in Google's UK SERPs for UK-specific searches, in addition to non-country-specific searches across Google US, Google CA, Google AU and so on.

Just do not set "country targeting" in Google Webmaster Tools unless you want to narrow down the geographic relevance of your site to one specific country, to the exclusion of others - let Google determine that on its own.