How to 'force' the US version of a global website
 

I'm in Prague at the moment and when I go to google.com (firefox FYI), it's converted to google.cz....sometimes helpful but mostly not.

Similar problem earlier this year in the BA club room in DME airport in Russia.
Someone before me had accessed yahoo.es (I think it was .es) and that always popped up whenever I tried yahoo.com or us.f542.mail.yahoo.com
And you can't clear the cookies on most lounge PCs'

Solutions?

http://www.google.com/ncr
http://world.yahoo.com/

Slightly easier for me as I am UK-based... but when Google insists on sending me to its Latvian or Danish version I force an English version by typing in www.google.co.uk

I wonder if www.google.us would do the trick?

BTW, it's not just your actual location that will make Google try to send you to a foreign-language version... I find that when I use T-mobile wifi in the UK Google somehow thinks I'm in Germany and insists on sending me to google.de!

www.google.com/ncr works well, with the added advantage that it 'sticks', meaning that you only have to enter it once.

I presume it uses a cookie to set you to .com more or less permanently.

When you visit a site like google.com, your numeric IP address (you can't see it, but everything on the Internet has an IP address) is sent with your request. Sites like Google check that against a database to get a pretty accurate indication what country that IP address has been allocated to.

That's how they to the redirecting trick.

So there is no solution to the yahoo.es issue that I referred to in the original post?

Many thanks KVS. Your suggestion has saved me oodles of time in locating words I understand.

MisterNice

sometimes I use the annoymouse.org website for just this type of thing. Also, if you HAVE any sort of VPN connection to a company, then that would do it. I have setup a simple VPN on my home router, so I can connect directly to the USA when I am abroad. It also has really helped with my slingbox traffic in places like India, South america and china. I think what happens is, only CERTAIN servers can/like to/want to pass the VPN authentication traffic so the routing is somewhat more optimal. When I run a tracert of the traffic, I end up doing about 50% less hops with the VPN connection THAN without the VPN connection.

What setup do you use for your home VPN? Are you running a Linux box or a modded router? (e.g. open-wrt, dd-wrt, etc).

I use the tomato router FW, and openvpn, but one could open a vpn port on any router and use a sW based vpn on a local machine. I have done this with my mac before, which is always on on the LAN.

They determine your location based on your IP address. There are a number of companies that provide services to analyze the IP address and locate where you're accessing the Internet from. Here's one that has a demo on their front page. In the case of TMobile, there is a decent chance that your access through their WiFi hotspots is routed back through their private network and then connects to the Internet in Germany.

S.

You can force Google to believe you are in any country with this:
http://merjis.com/local_google_search

I have used it, eg, when I am in Japan on my way to the US, to make it think I am in the US and recommend things that are in my destination location not Tokyo!

United now constantly resets itself to Japanese. It even is set to Japanese and shows my preference as location US/English in Japanese. This only started about a month or two ago. Any way to fix this?

This is the URL I get in the US:
http://www.united.com/web/en-US/default.aspx?root=1

Also, there is a language/country preference option on the top right of the screen. Does resetting that help?
http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/5170/7ctu.png

That URL works, thanks. Setting the preference does not work. That is what I was referring to. Preference in Japanese says USA/English but is still in Japanese!