Google Maps defaults to centre of the country

While reading the great joke Google Maps find Weapons of Mass Destruction, I noticed something strange: all searches performed without specifying a state give results in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa. Not exactly the states where I expect many things to happen. I did some more tests, and each time the results were found in the centre of the country.

I guess Google simply found too many results to display, and instead of showing the most significant results for the terms, it used some geographical parameters to decide what results to display...