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Why do webpages direct me to localised pages based on my IP address?
2 points by Tichy on April 18, 2007 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



It annoys me to no end - I already switched back to Yahoo as my primary search engine because Google sends me to the German page all the time. But Yahoo does the same with their mail service (luckily I hardly ever do it).

Why? It seems like the worst idea ever! Are programmers just sitting around thinking "let's do something really cool" and add this anti-feature? For the record: if I wanted the german Google, I would be clever enough to type google.DE instead of google.COM.

P.S.: I know there are ways to make Google show me the english page, but they either involve enabling permanent cookies or typing a longer URL.


I don't like it either. I've talked clients out of doing that and doing something instead with some of the content in the page. Just a portion though, not the entire thing. In my view Google should be Google.




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