Google Redirects

Google Belgium now open

[ROLAND_F]

Today I typed www.google.com and was redirected to www.google.be.

[ROLAND_F]

Very nice! I tried other domain but typing google.com and not being redirected is very convenient.

[Liane]

google.com worked for a couple of weeks but no longer! I get an automatic redirect to [google.vg...]

I HATE it!!! Guess I'll have to try Calum's method and see if that works. Geesh, just when the love affair with Google was going so well. Sigh.

[Macguru]

Same thing here Liane. google.com now redirects to english www.google.ca.

[jerryc]

google.com/en or www.google.com/en
should work fine :)

[billy_t9]

Also what about google.gr ?
do you know this redirection....hope to be not from google`s cookies :)

[Jaze]

Same goes here in NZ. What bugs me more is that while they take the time to redirect us for advertising purposes they forget to customise the news page results - all U.S. news sites and no NZ ones - comeon Google - go one way or another but give us the option!

[Macks]

Looks like us Aussies wont be affected by the redirections.

google.com.au is registered to another company. I wonder how much Google will pay for that one?

[Kickstart70]

I absolutely HATE THIS.

I'm Canadian, but I do NOT want to be directed to Google.ca. I didn't type "google.ca", I typed "google.com". That choice should be left up to me, the user, not the search engine I visit to decide how patriotic I wish to be or do not wish to be.

I know most people are not going to complain about this, but I sure am. At one point I paid to have a text box ad on the Google site, but I certainly am not going to do it again as long as this behavior continues.

I go to Google for simplicity and geek-friendliness. Too bad Google has lost site of us.

Greg Webster
Vancouver

[tbear]

I was a bit suprised that I could only aim my ads at a particular country, since my client's clients come from all over the world and not always from thier home country.

[Chris_D]

Redirection based on IP is one of the things which really annoys me about AV. Here in Australia - you ask to go to av.com - it cloaks and you to av.com.au Then you have to click on the link for 'AV around the world' - then select USA.
If IP cloaking to deliver country specific content, and user agent cloaking to deliver browser specific support (eg Google's handheld device stuff) are now 'legitimate' technology in googles eyes - shouldn't google make a public announcement of cloaking clarification??

[Liane]

I just did a search on www.google.com with no redirect!!! Thanks Google! I for one appreciate the switch back. I'd like to choose which database I see when searching. Right now I'm looking at office furniture online & appreciate having the "big picture".

[shelleycat]

I first noticed the google.co.nz redirection when they were posting the Dilbert cartoons. I wondered why I had to search the news page to find them each day (heh, I'm kinda unobservant and didn't notice the redirect immediately). The redirection irks me. Since then I've been using google toolbar because it searchs google.com.

What I've been wondering is does each country page give different results? I haven't done a lot of looking into this yet but they seem pretty much the same. But then .co.nz returns english language sites (naturally) so it may not show up as much. Since my new domain is appearing in this indexing for the first time and it's a .co.nz it will be interesting to see if I'll get better hits from the NZ version of google.

[Listener]

I search google.com from Canada using Netscape 4.76 almost every day. Today I used Internet Explorer and was redirected to google.ca.

[Macguru]

Hi Listener,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.
Did you read paynt's welcome post [webmasterworld.com]? Nice way to get started here.

I noticed this using NN on my Mac too.

What I (finally) like about the redirect is the local search option provided. But some of my clients sites are registered or hosted in other countries and are excluded from the discriminative search, even if installed "brick and mortar" here.

If some site aims at some local market (like real estate), it is better to register the domain and host the site locally.

Is anyone 100% sure of what Google use to make this discrimination?

[gillo]

Ok, here's a difficult question. we recently launched the new [greenpeace.org...] and, as Google, we have many languages/countries options.

From what I've read in this thread, people don't like redirects, so let's skip that. At the moment we have a couple of popups to make that choice, what do you think about those as a solution?

If you don't like popus (as many others), what would be a favorite alternative? bear in mind that, in case you'd say: "why not having a drop-down menu with the languages and another one with the countries available in that language on the front page of greenpeace.org?" My concern about that is that (I think) it's not possible to have different encodings in a drop down menu (or a page).

So, what to do?

[pete]

In our country Msn started re-directing surfers typing in Msn.com to the local portal and it was incredibly annoying. Fortunately, they stopped doing it.

The majority of internet users in our country would turn to Google to research a range of topics which far exceed local content. Being re-directed to inferior content (localized databases) is very frustrating IMHO.

[muesli]

i'm using www2.google.com when i don't want to be redirected.