Many websites look up the IP address that you are connecting with, or other browser header information, to redirect you automatically to a language specific website. While those systems usually get it right, they are annoying for users who do not want to be redirected to a country specific domain name or different language version.
The search engine Google is for instance redirecting first time users automatically to a localized search engine when they open google.com but do not have an IP address that resolves to the US. You can click on the go to google.com link at the bottom to force the switch but this is saved in a cookie which means that you will be redirected again if you delete the cookie or if it expires. Some users do not like to be patronized.
Back in 2008 I posted a solution to the question Why is Google.com redirecting me to another Google domain?. The solution back then was to use a special url to load google.com without being redirect to a country specific search domain.
The url http://www.google.com/webhp still works as intended. Roman send me an email recently that described a second option which blocks the redirect completely and loads the standard Google search engine homepage.
If you load http://www.google.com/ncr you tell Google that you do not want to be redirected. The NCR supposedly stands for No Country Redirect.
Now, if you bookmark that domain name you will always end up on the default google.com search page. Google will automatically save a cookie on your computer that prevents redirects to other localized Google search engine domains. You can theoretically open google.com directly after this point as long as you keep the cookie on the system. If you want to avoid troubles at all, you may want to always use the ncr address.
It is not an ideal solution, considering that you cannot seem to use http://www.google.com/ncr as your browser’s search engine for instance, but it works reasonably well if you bookmark the url and use that bookmark to open the Google search website.
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Hoi Martin, is it not even better and saver to use:
https://encrypted.google.com/ncr
Martin,
The url http://www.google.com/ncr does indeed lead me to the standard Google homepage, but only when I disable the addon “OptimizeGoogle” in Firefox 4.0 (on LinuxMint)…
OptimizeGoogle probably interferes with the Google url
I have resolved the redirect issue using forced HTTPS option under advanced options of NoScript. Since I live outside the US at time and clear cookies regularly the redirect had become a major pain in the neck with every search.
https implementation of google does not seem to have been rolled out to local domains (is it rolled out to anything outside google.com?). So if you force other domains to use https, they will automatically redirect to encrypted.google.com
problem solved with the added bonus of better privacy
nothing explained in this article work anylonger, forget it and hack google or use tor
i really like this it’s nice