My homepage is set to www.google.com. Recently (in the last week or so) it has come up as www.google.co.uk instead. Even if I type in “www.google.com” it always redirects to the UK site. I know there is no real difference, but I wonder why this is. Do people in other countries get this now? Does Google automatically give people their local Google page, based on IP address? When did they start doing this?
That title should be “Why will Google only let me access www.google.co.uk…” of course. That’s what comes of changing the title part way through writing it. Could a mod fix it?
Same here: If I type www.google.com into the address, I get taken to www.google.ca. Even if I click the link at the bottom that says “Go to Google.com” I end up at Google.ca
WAG: I suspect that Google has set a cookie that says “This person is in Canada, so use Google.ca instead of Google.com”
Yes, it’s cookie based.
When I’m on google.ca, there’s a link near the bottom of the main search screen that says ‘go to google.com’ which clears out the cookie. I’d imagine there’s something similar for the UK mirror
I think it’s a new ‘feature’ they’ve recently added - it’s never happened to me before, but did just now when I tried it. Perhaps it’s to balance the load on various servers, or simply to make people aware that the national versions exist?
I’ve noticed that behaviour for the google canada site in years… including the fact that they arbitrarily assigned me the google.ca cookie one day based on my IP address (I assume… many IP addresses could be assigned an international region according to a master lookup table.)
Load balancing makes sense… as well as the fact that the local mirrors may actually be set up in different parts of the world, so that your web traffic doesn’t need to go all the way to google headquarters. Google takes pride, I believe, in how quickly their home page comes up, so they’ll probably take quite a bit of effort to get every millisecond they can.
I’ve never noticed this either. Perhaps it has a good side though. Say I wanted information on the cheapest place to buy a 1920s style Death Ray, so obviously I would want a 240v machine and not a 110v one. Google would be able to provide me with the correct model for my area. In other words is it possible that Google will bias it’s results for whatever part of the world you live in?
This ‘feature’ has been turned on and off again over the past couple of years. It’s an irrirant but nothing too serious since there’s a radio button that allows you to look at the .com results. However, I believe that the regional versions use different database mirrors to the .com site, which might alter the results.
The UK site allows you to specify to search UK results, but it’s not the default. And I should have thought that biasing general results towards a geographic locality would be against the principles by which Google’s rankings work.
Most of the country-specific sites allow you to search either the whole web or just that country. (You can do this anyway, of course, by including, for instance, site:.uk in your search.)
Other sites have other options, for instance the Austrian site (www.google.at) lets you search either the whole web, or sites in German only, or Austrian sites only.
Yup, we go to the Irish Google, which allows us to specify Irish sites, but I find the UK Google more helpful, as most British sites will deliver to Ireland, and there are few Irish based sites.
The most annoying part of google is that since most US sites don’t deliver internationally (or charge exorbitant delivery fees) but don’t make this clear except in the very small print, “searching the web” can be very frustrating. On more than one occasion I’ve searched, found a ideal product, and when I try to order it, discover I can’t.
But everyone lives in the USA on the web :rolleyes: That’s why all the spam promises we can earn **$**10,000 a week…
…and all those hot girls who apparently take it up the ass…
My bookmark is http://www.google.com/advanced_search which doesn’t do the .au redirect. But searching from Firefox’s Google box does.
It’s not cookie based. I don’t let google save cookies on my computer and I still get redirected.
It must be refering to your IP and working out your country from there. So there’s no way out of it as long as they have this feature switched on. It must be new this week. I’ve only just noticed.
Also note that the Go to Google.com link at the bottom of the page has an “ncr” directory. Doesn’t take a genius to work out what that means.
But it still takes me back to google.ca , not google.com
And it does seem to be at least partially cookie-based. FireFox shows a “PREF” cookie for Google.ca, but if I delete it, it gets replaced right away. So the decision of whether or not to place the cookie must come from the IP address.
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You know how the Google logo is stylized with art which changes according to current holidays or events? This varies by country. Canadian and American Thanksgiving Days, for example, occur at different times.
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I haven’t verified this, but it’s possible that internationalization also allows the page to be represented with spellings appropriate to the region. American, British and Canadian English all have spelling variations of the same words, and of course, Asian countries use entirely different languages and character sets.
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I don’t think this changes the search result base. I still frequently get German sites listed in my search results.
When in Google, look for a “preferences” link. There, you can choose the language that you prefer.
Hey, don’t drag us Canadians and Australians into your dollar-hating… uh… hatred!
Colonials rule!
I get directed to google.ca, too, and often when I’m looking to buy something, it’s handy to search Canadian sites only.