Feb 23, 2024
Chrome thinks i'm in a different country to the one i'm in
Chrome takes me to the Spanish or Irish version of most websites even though i'm in the UK. I have tried to follow the instructions to change my location but the instructions don't match the options i see in my Chrome setting page (Privacy & Security - Location)
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Ellie123
My searches are in the wrong country or language
Google Search is customized for many countries and regions around the world. For example, if you do a Google search in France, you’ll get search results on the French country service. Google looks up your device’s IP address in their database to determine your approximate location and redirects your Google Search to the appropriate local country service.
For a variety of reasons, using IP addresses to determine location is not 100% accurate. If you're ending up with the wrong Google country service, and perhaps even seeing Google in a different language, this might be because Google has wrongly detected your location. For example, this could be happening if you’re in Australia but your searches are ending up on the Google country service for the United Kingdom or Japan.
If your Google Searches are using the wrong country service, the first thing to do is report the problem so Google can update your IP address. They may be able to fix the problem pretty quickly but, in some cases, it could take a month or more.
If you’re travelling, Google will change the country service, and possibly even the language, depending on where in the world you’re detected.
In the meantime, you can still visit your own or any other Google Search domain for searching, but you’ll need to change the region setting to match it. This is because Google recently changed the way they use localization. See this announcement: Making search results more local and relevant
As part of this change, a new section called "Region Settings" has been added in Settings > Search settings. For reasons best known to Google, the default region for localization is based on "Current Region" (i.e., your detected location), regardless of which Google country domain you visit, and regardless of whether your location has been correctly detected. I know, it makes no sense!
To change the default region of any country domain to get it to function correctly:
- Open the Google country domain you want to use for searching (e.g., https://www.google.de)
- Open Settings > Search settings
- Under Region Settings at the bottom of the page, select the region corresponding to the Google domain you're using
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save
- You may also have to change and save the Language settings.
If you’re signed in to your Google account, the region will be saved in your account. If you’re signed out, the region setting will be recorded in browser cookies. If you’re using an incognito browser window the setting will be lost when the window is closed.
If you’re searching from the browser address bar, you’ll probably need to add a new default search engine or set up a smart keyword search engine. Not all browsers will allow this.
Fred