Google May Be Google In Any Language But The Search Results Ain’t!
Like a lot of people, if your browsers homepage is set to www.google.com you’ll notice something it when you’re in another country – it redirects itself to whatever the local country version of Google is for the country you’re in at the time.
So for example, if you’re in the UK it will shoot off to google.co.uk or in Canada it will redirect to google.ca and so on.
Whilst this is mildly annoying and often inconvenient it can be a real problem if you are in a non-English speaking country (for all us English speakers).
I recently moved to Lithuania and don’t really speak much of the language so imagine my frustration when I try to google something and I’m presented with a bunch of results in Lithuanian!
The same would apply if say you’re on vacation to Spain, France or Mexico. Google.es, google.fr and google.com.mx respectively present themselves.
Simple Solution
Thankfully, Google have been clever enough to provide a way around this problem although it’s not immediately obvious.
When your Google homepage redirects itself to whatever country’s Google homepage that you are in at the time simply click the link under the search as shown below.
Making It Permanent
If you want to make sure that Google always goes to google.com in English when you open your web browser then simply make the homepage of your browser http://www.google.com/ncr
The /ncr on the end of Google.com means No Country Redirect. Thank Google!
Thank YOU for posting this; don’t thank Google, who hasn’t made it AT ALL apparent how to take care of this problem. I have searched google help and countless forums.
No problem jford.
I find it incredibly annoying that Google redirect you to a site you didn’t ask for.
R.
What I did was I went to google u.s. and copied the url on the address bar to my browser’s homepage setting. Same effect.
this is very Helpful thank you <3
THANKS
Thank you. I’ve been trying to solve this for days.
Thanks! Very, very helpful.
This, of course, won’t work if you’re searching from your address bar, which is what most people do, considering how easy it is. Having to go to google, then select English, or the NCR tag are just more needed unnecessary steps. And annoying! Most browsers have a trick for disabling country redirection. At least Firefox and Opera do.
And thanking Google for giving us a lousy way out of redirection when there shouldn’t be any to begin with is, well, how can I put it? Brilliant! So yes, thank you google for annoying the hell out of us and then giving us an half-working option.
Brilliant!!! This /ncr tip will be a boon to ex-pats everywhere.
great tip, I travel around Europe every week, have been annoyed for ages by this redirection, never did anything about it though.
Well
I’m in Sweden and when I enter google.com I get google in THAI!? And there is no “google in english” button either. Weird.
To add, what i do get is a choice to use google.se and when I click on it I get google in Swedish, just as i should. However, when I use Google.se (in swedish) and click on the “Google in english” button I get the thai version again!
Christian..it seems your network could be going through a proxy or VPN of some kind making it think it’s in Thailand…another possibility is some browser plugin. Have you tried with a different browser? What happens if you open http://www.google.com/ncr ?
R.
wow. thank you. why was it so hard for me to find this simple solution?!
YEAH? Well when I did it, the address URL SAYS .com instead of .se, but the PAGE it brings me to IS STILL GOOGLE SVENSKA.
I am SICK OF THIS SHIT. FRRAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKK !!!
sick sick sick sick sick effing sick.
okay the first time I did it, it took me to google.com all right.
I look UP, the URL says google.com (which should be American google) and my google home page says GOOGLE svenska, and it’s in Swedish, AND the search results are in Swedish even though i specifically did NOT request swedish language results and english is chosen as my google search LANGUAGE ON SETTINGS !!! GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I mean I swear to god I want to cry, I’m so frustrated I have tears in my eyes.
WORSE my own Google+ account has everything in Swedish and I can barely navigate it, so it’s basically worthless right now.
ಥ_ಥ ಥ_ಥ
I feel your pain. I am locked into german after a week in Austria and cannot get rid of it – spent hours with trying the /ncr “trick’ – no success. About ready to drop google. Same problem in both Firefox and Chrome
I still have an issue after changing some settings (use http://www.google.com/ncr and change language settings).
I’m in The Netherlands right now and when I do a search for example ‘garnier.com’, it shows their US website in English in the search results. Then when I click on it, it redirects me to the local Dutch site.
If I do a search for ‘Match.com’, it shows their English homepage. Then when I click on it, it redirects me to lexa.nl, their Dutch version of Match.com. Could someone explain why this happen and how I fix this? Thanks so much.
Hey Rebecca Smith,
You need to change your Google Search language.
See the video below to learn how to do that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfbG_Lu3jLw