If you travel to foreign countries or are not from US, Firefox has the annoying habit of returning search results in a language based on the nationality of the service provider. When I was at home in France, it’d default to Google.fr, but at work in Switzerland it would default to Google.ch.

Here is a simple trick to default your search to Google.com, regardless of which country you are in.

On your browser’s URL bar, if you typed in google.com, it will redirect to your country local domains (such as google.fr or google.ch).

To search on Google.com, you just have to type in http://www.google.com/ncr and google.com will automatically appear. For your info, the ‘ncr’ refers to No Country Redirect.

A good thing about this is that you don’t have to type in ‘google.com/ncr’ everytime you want to search in Google. The first time you go to google.com/ncr page, Google will set a cookie in your browser and make all your future searches default to google.com. This means that you only need to go to www.google.com/ncr once and you will be able to search Google.com right from your Firefox’s search bar (at the top right corner) at all time.

Get your Google local domain back

You just need to clear your cookie and your Google local domain will show up the next time you type in Google.com.

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