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Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

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Re: Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

#11

Post by dragop »

mahouse wrote: post #6

What really gets on my nerves is that I can't configure it to use google.com when I search from the omnibox, I don't even know from where is it getting my current country, I guess it's IP geolocation.

Geolocation is another reason ncr is useful, when using VPNs.

Re: Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

#14

Post by jakobegger »

weinzierl wrote: post #2

I use Google Search rarely but https://www.google.com/ncr is still in my muscle memory. Nowadays I just ddg.gg and in the rare case I'm not satisfied with the results I add g! in the search bar. The g! seems to give me the same results as https://www.google.com/ncr . (I like to consider this a feature and not a bug.) To give you some perspective: I live in Germany but prefer to read programming or scientific topics i…

There's also !gde, !gat etc if you do want German, Austrian etc. version of Google.

Re: Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

#15

Post by asuffield »

mahouse wrote: post #6

What really gets on my nerves is that I can't configure it to use google.com when I search from the omnibox, I don't even know from where is it getting my current country, I guess it's IP geolocation.

I haven't looked at this explicitly, but I would expect that if you sign in to chrome then it will follow your account preferences for which locality to use. Does that not work?

Re: Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

#17

Post by kozukumi »

wslh wrote: post #13

Also, the prize for the stupidest behavior was won by Google: adding your country's suffix to a blogspot blog.

This annoys the hell out of me as it also never seems to correctly remember I clicked "got it" to the "we use cookies" message that sticks to the top of the page.

Re: Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

#18

Post by currysausage »

It used to be like this: Visit https://www.google.com/ncr once, and on further requests, https://www.google.com/ or https://www.google.com/?hl=en wouldn't redirect to google.de any more. Unfortunately, visiting https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&gws_rd=cr doesn't appear to have this effect. Still a good workaround, so thanks for sharing!

I wonder if this might have anything to do with that EU right to be forgotten thing. The EU would like Google to remove search results from google.com, which is obviously very undesirable for Google, so maybe they try to appease the EU by making google.com harder to access for Europeans? Maybe the Use Google.com link will be removed soon?

Re: Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

#19

Post by scrollaway »

wslh wrote: post #13

Also, the prize for the stupidest behavior was won by Google: adding your country's suffix to a blogspot blog.

It pisses the hell off me too, but there's a really good reason for it:

https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en

https://googleblog.blogspot.gr/2012/03/our-approach-to-free-...

Re: Tell HN: Google seems to have changed ncr (no country redirect)

#20

Post by patio11 »

wslh wrote: post #13

Also, the prize for the stupidest behavior was won by Google: adding your country's suffix to a blogspot blog.

This is how Google managed to avoid having the entire domain made illegal in some countries, most importantly Germany, due to wantonly hosting illegal content: shard into per-country domains, ban the per-country illegal content on their domain, and shrug regarding the other domains.

The particular issue was that Germany, for historical reasons, has restrictions about what one can say about Naziism which are not compatible with American notions of free speech.

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