Google.com sending me to UK Google

radiospan

Hi,

For the past few weeks, every time I enter www.google.com into Firefox i get sent to www.google.co.uk whereas previously I had been sent to www.google.ie .

Anyone know why this is happening? How does it know that I'm in Ireland in the first place? Is it based on IP address? (I'm using Clicksilver) Or is there a setting somewhere? I can't seem to find any "Location" box in my Gmail / Google settings.

The same happens when I do a Google search using the Firefox search box.

halenger

It's IP based from what I've heard. Clicksilver must be giving you a UK IP or some such thing.

radiospan

Ah dear. Can anybody else on Clicksilver confirm this? My IP right now is 194.46.93.xxx

aidan_walsh

There are mechanisms that allow you to estimate where a person is based on their IP address, but these aren't always reliable. It could be that you were assigned an IP that is confusing Google's system.

Edit: Beaten

jmcc

halenger wrote:

It's IP based from what I've heard. Clicksilver must be giving you a UK IP or some such thing.

Google's redirection is IP based. The IP range quoted is according to RIPE [1], a UK based IP range. Therefore Google will redirect it to www.google.co.uk rather than www.google.ie. (GB is the country code used for the UK in the RIPE database).

Regards...jmcc
[1] http://www.ripe.net/fcgi-bin/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searchtext=194.46.93.0

radiospan

OK, thanks for clearing that up.

What kind of IP address do other Clicksilver users have? Because up until a few weeks ago (or maybe longer), I was definately being redirected to google.ie

So since then, either the RIPE database has been updated, or Clicksilver have changed the IP range that their Irish customers are being assigned.

paddy

I've been on clicksilver for a year now and without fail my home page comes up as Google.ie, my current I.P. is 194.46.89.xxx.

HTH
P.

Mutant_Fruit

its quite likely you have some sort of spyware.

The reason i say this is that i recently cleared out a PC of spyware, and it had redirects on it so that whatever google address you typed in (.ie or .co.uk or .com or whatever) it redirected to a specific IP address, a "fake" google.

Download spybot from there, and see if that picks anything up (if you don't have it already...)

leeroybrown

I think google set a cookie to redirect you to a specific country's portal. At a guess you may have a cookie set redirecting you to google.co.uk. Either delete the cookie or go to their site selection page and select Ireland. If you're lucky that should be enough to sort it out.

jmcc

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

its quite likely you have some sort of spyware.

Nice theory - what facts? Google's redirect is IP based. The RIPE database of IP allocations describes the particular IP range as being GB/UK rather than IE and Google then forwards to www.google.co.uk since it has detected a UK IP.

The reason i say this is that i recently cleared out a PC of spyware, and it had redirects on it so that whatever google address you typed in (.ie or .co.uk or .com or whatever) it redirected to a specific IP address, a "fake" google.

Not impossible. But the explanation I gave above is probably right. It is, though, better to be safe than sorry with spyware. However a simple check on the RIPE WHOIS URL tends to back up the explanation I gave.

What I have noticed (especially with the US IP ranges) is that sometimes an operation with a large allocation of IP addresses will create sub allocations for clients that may have different country fields. It is not unusual to see for example, IPs on a range that is owned by a US hosting operation subnetted and one or two of the subnets being assigned to an Irish operation. Hostireland.com's IP ranges appear like this.

Regards...jmcc

leeroybrown

Interestingly, as a test I selected google.co.uk on the language selector. Now google.com (which I never visit directly) redirects to the UK portal. Removing cookies and creating a clean Firefox profile have no effect on this selection. Obviously Google are maintaining some record of IP address to location mapping.

jmcc

leeroybrown wrote:

Interestingly, as a test I selected google.co.uk on the language selector. Now google.com (which I never visit directly) redirects to the UK portal. Removing cookies and creating a clean Firefox profile have no effect on this selection. Obviously Google are maintaining some record of IP address to location mapping.

Actually the IP thing is very scary from the electronic privacy point of view. Most of the technology journalists writing in the Irish press rely on press releases and just don't see the big picture. Everytime you do a search on a search engine, the search, the IP and the results are recorded. It is a highly useful set of data in that an operator can see trends developing and also track the search histories. With DSL and fixed IPs search engine operators can now correlate IPs and searches with people and businesses. And of course IP can be useful for geolocation and redirection.

Regards...jmcc

Q3000

Sorry no conspiracy it’s just picking up on the language settings in your browser go to tools/settings in IE and select the Language button, English UK is probably the first language in the list if you change this to English (Ireland) you will be redirected to google.ie if you change your language selection to German and you get redirected to google.de and so on

Seeing as firefox is also picking up on this I would bet that English UK is selected in the Regional and Language options in Control Panel so you can change this if you want as well

rabbitinlights

What the big diffrence between .co.uk/.ie, is it effecting your searching skills?

s.

Mutant_Fruit

Nice theory - what facts? Google's redirect is IP based

I think ya misunderstood... he's never actually getting to google at all. Suppose googles IP's are all 123.123.123.x. The only value that changes for the different country portals is the last segment.

I've seen spyware (type stuff) that takes ALL requests for 123.123.123.x IP's and redirect them to 456.456.456.456. Thus you're never actually getting to google. What tipped me off on this was that when i went to "google" on the spyware laden computer, i couldn't find spybot in the search results, and it should have been number one.

Its a possibility that this has happened in this case.

EDIT: Well, in this case the spyware crap was taking the name requests (i.e. google.com/google.co.uk etc) and returning 456.456.456.456 as the ip address for each of the google mirrors... if you know what i mean.

robinph

rabbitinlights wrote:

What the big diffrence between .co.uk/.ie, is it effecting your searching skills?

s.

I dont think that there is any difference between the two, apart form the UK one may get a different 'amusing' Google graphic on the front page on St Georges day or something.

aidan_walsh

rabbitinlights wrote:

What the big diffrence between .co.uk/.ie, is it effecting your searching skills?

s.

In each of Google's regional domains, you can specify that you want to only search for pages that are in that country.