Traveling abroad can quickly become frustrating when you attempt a search on Google.com and discover you are redirected to the local countries variant of Google, with the local language and all. This language redirect can happen when using a VPN or proxy as well. While this is convenient for things like local search and Maps, if you’re trying to find results in English while you’re in a non-english speaking country or on a non-english Google site, the redirect is annoying and can end up being outright confusing.
Fortunately, there’s a simple and quick solution to the automatic Google country redirect, insuring that you’ll always visit the one-and-only Google.com regardless of your current location on the globe.
The solution to stop the Google language and country redirect is simple enough: use the alternate NCR Google URL of “http://google.com/ncr” – This little known alternate Google NCR page stands for “No Country Redirect” and will always display Google.com in English – regardless of whether you’re in India, China, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, UK, New Zealand, Australia, or anywhere else on planet Earth.
Here’s the Google NCR No Country Redirect URL: Just remember this, or better yet, bookmark it for when you’re traveling out of your native region:
- http://www.google.com/ncr – this URL always goes to Google.com
You can click that link to open Google NCR or just put the URL in your web browser, be it Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, whatever:
An alternate solution is to use Google’s Language Tools to set a primary language for a specific Google account as well, but the NCR link to be much easier to remember and more flexible, because it does not require you to log in to a Google account to work (whereas setting a default language does require the login).
This a fairly general tip and it applies to all web browsers and all computers running all OS’s, meaning whether you’re using Mac OS X on a MacBook Air, iPad, iPhone, Windows 7 or Windows 10 on a PC, Android on a smartphone, or anything else, you can always get the plain Google.com URL.
One final tip regarding Google localization; you can go the reverse direction as well, if you want to load another countries or regions Google version, simply apply their Top Level Domain to the Google URL, or adjust the account Language Tools to fit your desired search localization. Of course, using a proxy, SOCKS proxy and SSH tunnel, or VPN with an IP in the desired region is another way, but that’s a bit more technical beyond the scope of simply adjusting a URL in your web browser.
Happy travels, where ever you are! If you know of another way to get localized versions of global Google websites, let us know in the comments!
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