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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)

#21

Post by StavrosK »

patio11 wrote: post #20
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 compa…

Why redirect to the domain? Why not just block by geoip?

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

currysausage wrote: post #18

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 thi…

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by dorfsmay »

fulafel wrote: post #12

It's too bad Google ignores the browser's language preferences, this wouldn't be needed if they weren't so broken wrt Accept-Language.

country ≠ language

For example, you can get google.ca in French or English by changing your browser Accept-Language.

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

#24

Post by dorfsmay »

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…

Note that I have found that if you log into a Google account to do all your searches for a given topic, you actually get better results, e.g. searching for ACL, getting results related IT vs. knees.

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

#25

Post by r3bl »

asuffield wrote: post #15
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?

I prefer to have everything tech-related written in English, but with Google, I constantly get some of their services translated into my local language. I have to keep translating their services back to English.

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

#29

Post by nostrademons »

StavrosK wrote: post #21
patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

Why redirect to the domain? Why not just block by geoip?

GeoIPs aren't 100% reliable - there's a small but non-negligible chance that geolocating your IP will place you in a different country than you're actually in. When faced with the choice between accidentally censoring legitimate content that you have a right to see vs. accidentally letting you see content that is banned in your country, Google would much rather let you accidentally see the banned stuff.

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

#30

Post by StavrosK »

nostrademons wrote: post #29
StavrosK wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why redirect to the domain? Why not just block by geoip?

GeoIPs aren't 100% reliable - there's a small but non-negligible chance that geolocating your IP will place you in a different country than you're actually in. When faced with the choice between accidentally censoring legitimate content that you have a right to see vs. accidentally letting you see content that is banned in your country, Google would much rather let you accidentally see the banned stuff.

But what's the benefit of adding another detection layer over the existing one? If the GeoIP is wrong, it'll still redirect me to the blocked domain. If I can change the domain and access it anyway, what's the purpose of blocking?

It doesn't make sense to me that they implemented GeoIP blocking by redirection, as it only has added downsides.

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