
Ask HN: Why does Google force country redirects? - briandear
In the old days, you could use the google.com&#x2F;ncr &quot;trick&quot; to avoid being redirected to a local version of Google. That stopped working long ago.<p>Why do companies insist on redirecting to local versions of sites based on IP address geolocation? If a user wanted google.fr, shouldn&#x27;t that be what they type? If they want google.com, shouldn&#x27;t that be respected?<p>Why does &quot;the web&quot; (meaning a large number of websites) attempt to infer both your location as well as what you want? google.com reflects a user&#x27;s intent of going to google.com, while google.fr respects a users intent to go to the French &quot;version&quot; of Google.<p>For example, searching for &quot;4x4 mountain lodges California&quot; from google.com, while located in France, provides a tripadvisor.fr result at the top. Even though I might physically be in France, that&#x27;s irrelevant to my search query -- unless my search query were in French, then it would be more relevant than a tripadvisor.com result.<p>Why do companies like Google ignore the user&#x27;s intent -- and why we tolerate that? For Apple&#x27;s iTunes Store, as a counter example, I can switch to whatever store matches a billing credit card address, which is fair enough. But with Google, it seems that you are being actively blocked from searching how you might want to search. &quot;Use in English&quot; or &quot;Use Google.com&quot; doesn&#x27;t solve the issue, because the search results are still using location. Even Duck Duck Go infers your location from your IP. &quot;The search engine that doesn&#x27;t track you.&quot; That might be true, but it&#x27;s still using geolocation, which, to me still feels like an violation of both user intent as well as privacy. Just as a street address represents a specific, exact place, shouldn&#x27;t web addresses? If I call the US phone number for Marriott, they don&#x27;t answer the phone in French because I might be calling from there. So why the hell do websites do that?<p>Why did we let the web get so broken?
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seren
I am working for an American company in France connecting to the internet
through a London proxy and I always got the local Polish page.

