Whenever I go to Google’s home page ( http://www.google.com/ ), I end up at their Canadian page. This has been happening for several days now. Any idea why? Did Google somehow get the idea that I live in Canada? Or is this just the first step in the Canadian takeover of the world?[sup]1[/sup]
Using Google Canada changes some of the results I get. For instance, I did a seach for the Comsumer Price Index and the first result was to the StatisticsCanada page on it rather than the US government page as I would expect.
I can get to the regular Google page by going to google.us, which takes me to Google, but I don’t want to change my link. And even there, I still get some things with a Canadian slant, such as the sponsored links.
[sup]1[/sup]I, for one, welcome our new Canadian overlords. But then, who doesn’t?
In the page you get you can click on “preferences” and set your preference on that and other things. And you need to allow their cookies for it to work. If you delete your cookies you’ll have to start over again.
I’d already checked the preferences page and couldn’t find anything there that indicated my country. Language, yes, but last I heard they speak English in Canada too.
I just went to Google to doublecheck my preferences and this time it went to the regular Google page. So perhaps something I did earlier (I did save my preferences because it had the wrong filtering set) fixed it.
I do wonder what I did to make it think I was Canadian. Went to too many Canadian pages, perhaps?
It’s going by your IP address. Your ISP might go out into the world through a network connection that is located in Canada. It’s also possible that a browser hijack is routing and filtering all of your traffic through a computer somewhere in Canada.
When I travel, like in China, I get the local Google, like google.cn, but in the main front page I also get a link “go to google.com”. You don’t have that?