The previous generation looked at Dictionaries, encyclopedia and news magazines for the unending quest of knowledge and information. Today, all these have been replaced by one thing – the Google search engine. The current generation is exposed to a wealth of information that took generations to accumulate and consolidate.
However, do you always get what you are looking for and from where you are looking for using the Google search engine. Everyone would have experienced this. You would have been keen to search for something in google.com expecting results from around the world, but contrarily you get local results. That is because Google identifies the country (and in some cases even specific details about the region) from where you are searching. Google does this expecting that you are being given the most relevant search results according to your region. However, at time it becomes quite irritating when you repeatedly get redirected to the Google page of your region.
Don’t lose hope. There are tips and tricks to overcome this feature of Google. Let me take you through the methods that can help you circumvent the location specific Google search results (shown in the Google website).
Temporary solution:
In the address bar just type www.google.com/ncr. This should take you to the www.google.com website without the local influence. You may get a prompt from Google asking to know your location. You can click the “Block” button to prevent Google from accessing your location and trying to generate local results in the search page.
Using Google’s language tool – If you set English as the language and United States as the country with your login (Google/Gmail account), Google will display search results relevant to the United States even though the google.com would be displayed a google.co.xx (where xx is the country from where you are searching). This method has its own limitations as many wouldn’t want to use their own Google credentials to search in shared computers or even other mobile devices.
Permanent Solution – Chrome:
This trick works only with the Google browser – Chrome. Open Google Chrome and go to Settings. In the “Settings” page under the “Search” category click the “Manage search engines” button. You will see a list of search engines with Google at the top being the default one. If you scroll down to the bottom of that screen, you will get an option to “Add a new search engine”. Now, let us try to add a custom search engine that would return you search results from google.com without the local influence by following these steps:-
- Name: Google Universal
- Keyword: GU
- Value: http://www.google.com/ncr?#search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:instantFieldTrialGroupParameter}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s&hl=en
- Hit ENTER to save this setting.
Now, you should be seeing an entry in the search entry list called “Google Universal”. On highlighting it with your mouse pointer, you would get an option to make it the default search engine. You can set it as the default search engine when you query any keyword using Google Chrome in future.
| Also Read : Google search Tips and Tricks |
Now, any search made by directly typing in the address bar of Google Chrome will return search results using the Google.com only. If you have not made any changes to the default search engine, you can also type GU in the address bar and press the TAB key in your keyboard. You should see “Search Google Universal” being added to the address bar. Now any keyword typed in will trigger a search using only the google.com search engine for that session.
Of course, you do have another trick too. Add www.google.com/ncr to your Chrome bookmarks. Now whenever you type the letter g in the address bar, the bookmarked www.google.com/ncr would be loaded enabling you to search using that.
