[Stickeelion]

I live in Australia however most of the time I'm looking for foreign content/results, mostly Norwegian as well as French and German. No matter how hard I try I cannot get any Norwegian results in my searches, French and German is easier to find but is still a pain, I want to be able to get my search results as though someone from within the foreign country would get them.

I have tried Google.com, Google.com.au and Google.no (Norway Google) I have cleared cookies, cleared history, changed my location in Google search settings, tried typing my search terms in Norwegian and English. I have spent weeks at this and I have attempted every combination possible and tried every other trick I could find and absolutely nothing is working!!

to understand how bad it is if I look for "news Norway" or "Norwegian news" I will only ever find Australian news sites talking about Norway instead of native Norwegian news. And If I type in "DVD stores Norway" I will get only Australian (and some American) sites and even the most popular Norwegian websites will not show up for 10 pages if I'm lucky, most often not at all. This happens regardless of the location I set and which Google domain and language I use.

I have talked to a Norwegian friend that when he does the same thing as me (typing English search terms into Google.no) he gets vastly different results for his searches

I have learned that Google uses the geographical location of your IP address to personalise your results, I have a feeling that this is what is affecting my results. I am at my wits end, why must google make this such a nightmare?

I just want to disable this or have it so I can set it to any other country at will so that I get search results as if I was searching from within the foreign country. Can anybody help me with this?

TLDR
Cannot get native norwegian content (Also others to a lesser extent) when in Australia, tried everything nothing works, I want to get search results as if I was searching from within the foreign country

 

[Ulquiorra]

you could try adding add site:.no

This resticts sites to the norwigen extension (not perfect of course), so something like
site:.no olso local news

Otherwise run it through google first
oslo lokale nyheter

OR use google advance search
http://www.google.com/advanced_search

And swap it to the region you want

, using the advance search method you should be able to update your helper url (about:config in firefox), to point to your region search instead

 

[Stickeelion]

Thank you for that Ulquiorra it's quite helpful, not perfect but it's a darn sight better than what I was getting before, using the site:.no did the trick.

However wont this leave out
Norwegian sites that use .org or .net?

it would be nice though if Google gave an option to completely disable the IP geolocating part though

 

[Ulquiorra]

aye it would as i said it aint perfect

,

you can overide the region of page source by advanced search

, its just not allways right ^_^

 

[[email protected]]

www.duckduckgo.com

Google is fine for some purposes, but they're filtering is of no use when you really need to find something besides what they think you want/is popular.

 

[Ximius]

Hi,
What you can do is set up a new "custom" search provider. The details of this depend on what browser youre using but an example for Chrome is here:

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95653?hl=en

Basically what youre doing is customizing the URL that gets used when you type something into the search box. Now in your case, you also want to specify location and maybe language. For google you can customize the search like this:

https://www.google.no/search?pws=0&gl={location}&lr={language}&q=%s

First of all this is going directly to google.no, not google.geolocatemeplease.com. The "%s" in the above query will be replaced by Chrome with whatever you types. In my examples below I searched for "restaurants"

Secondly, the gl parameter and lr parameter control "location" and "language" of results, just like in advanced settings. The key here is they will get used every time. Also the "pws" parameter means "dont personalize my results based on things like search history.

Now then, say you want Norge results. So set gl=no. And, if you only want the Norge language results, add "lr=lang_no" as well. The lr parameter is optional here. As an example, I searched for "restaurants" first without using "lr" and get this:



Then I search again, this time also adding "lr=lang_no" and get this:



So does that look like it does what you want?

 

[Stickeelion]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ximius

Hi,
What you can do is set up a new "custom" search provider. The details of this depend on what browser youre using but an example for Chrome is here:

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95653?hl=en

Basically what youre doing is customizing the URL that gets used when you type something into the search box. Now in your case, you also want to specify location and maybe language. For google you can customize the search like this:

https://www.google.no/search?pws=0&gl={location}&lr={language}&q=%s

First of all this is going directly to google.no, not google.geolocatemeplease.com. The "%s" in the above query will be replaced by Chrome with whatever you types. In my examples below I searched for "restaurants"

Secondly, the gl parameter and lr parameter control "location" and "language" of results, just like in advanced settings. The key here is they will get used every time. Also the "pws" parameter means "dont personalize my results based on things like search history.

Now then, say you want Norge results. So set gl=no. And, if you only want the Norge language results, add "lr=lang_no" as well. The lr parameter is optional here. As an example, I searched for "restaurants" first without using "lr" and get this:

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

Then I search again, this time also adding "lr=lang_no" and get this:

So does that look like it does what you want?

thank you heaps for your in depth reply Ximius, I greatly appreciate it, those results you are getting is exactly what I want to be able to get i did exactly as you said with the gl=no and the lr=lang_no however my results were varied

1) when I did it the first way without the lr option I got totally different results:


2) secondly with the lr I did get the same results (Yay! thank you) as you however i did notice I had less options that you in the search settings (circled red)


I would like to work out why I cannot get the first one to work like you? I would like to fix that too

 

[Ximius]

Glad it worked for you!

However sorry but I am not sure what I might be doing differently than you to get somewhat different results. I just tried the same queries in IE instead of Chrome and my results are consistent. So I do not believe that it has to do with my browser settings. I would be open to any ideas you or anyone else might have.

 

[Stickeelion]

Hmm, I guess that is due to IP localisation

 

[c3p0c3p0]

Hm maybe 2 workarounds for this. First what comes to mind is that chrome (barely could tell from all that tabs open) use geotracking.

Turn off geotracking:
-> Options -> Under The Hood -> Content Settings -> Location:


Maybe check if google is adressed in exceptions. Would be possible, can't check now since I'm mainly on aurora ff

Second way would be to use a proxyapplication. Here are some proxy entries for .no http://aliveproxy.com/proxy-list/proxies.aspx/Norway-no

 

[jwheatly]

i am a bit late to this discussion but here is a Google link i use when i want to search on a region-free Google,. it might help you in not getting aussie news about norway when searching for norwegian local news.

• http://www.google.com/ncr

 

[Ximius]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jwheatly

i am a bit late to this discussion but here is a Google link i use when i want to search on a region-free Google,. it might help you in not getting aussie news about norway when searching for norwegian local news.

• http://www.google.com/ncr

NCR skips country redirects and effectively makes you go to the "Main Google" site ( USA ). NCR is short for No Country Redirect.

OP, does this help you with what your are trying to do? My understanding was more that you wanted the regionalized results, just not the ones for the locale you are physically in.

In any case, if it helps all the better!

 

[Stickeelion]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ximius

Quote:

Originally Posted by jwheatly

i am a bit late to this discussion but here is a Google link i use when i want to search on a region-free Google,. it might help you in not getting aussie news about norway when searching for norwegian local news.

• http://www.google.com/ncr

NCR skips country redirects and effectively makes you go to the "Main Google" site ( USA ). NCR is short for No Country Redirect.

OP, does this help you with what your are trying to do? My understanding was more that you wanted the regionalized results, just not the ones for the locale you are physically in.

In any case, if it helps all the better!

cheers guys, I appreciate your effort, however the google NCR link was the first thing I tried which unfortunately didn't make for me at all
Quote:

Originally Posted by c3p0c3p0

Hm maybe 2 workarounds for this. First what comes to mind is that chrome (barely could tell from all that tabs open) use geotracking.

Turn off geotracking:
-> Options -> Under The Hood -> Content Settings -> Location:


Maybe check if google is adressed in exceptions. Would be possible, can't check now since I'm mainly on aurora ff

Second way would be to use a proxyapplication. Here are some proxy entries for .no http://aliveproxy.com/proxy-list/proxies.aspx/Norway-no

I tried both of those and unfortunately neither worked, lr=lang_no pages work but not plain google.no with both english and norwegian

EDIT: ok Google Chrome is being a right royal pain (what were the developers thinking!?!?) I have no idea what's going on in there it just refuses to work, however I tried Firefox and it worked right away, I can get exactly what I want, no problems, no changing settings, no proxy, perfectly fine (though I must be logged out of my google account for it to work). I'm on firefox Ver 21, kind of apprehensive to update lest they have done something that will affect this. I am happy with this solution, I would rather use google chrome, if anyone has any idea as to why its not working still I would be gratefull but I'm comfortable how it is at the moment.

Cheers folks, +rep all round

(And IE derped up completely funnily enough

, got a "your computer is sending automated queries" error.)