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September 1, 2017

How To Force Chrome To Ignore Your Location & Use Google.Com

Or: How We Turned the Melbourne Office Right Side Up

I love life in Melbourne, Australia, but living and working on the other side of the world from my colleagues presents some interesting challenges. It’s much harder to catch up with my US coworkers for coffee or drinks though we still manage the occasional happy hour. We also knew that Google.com.au would give me different results than Google.com, so Nancy adjusted some of my assignments. I no longer did article tracking for rep management cases, since we knew the results would be so different. For most research and writing assignments, it was perfectly fine. Until one day it wasn’t…

I was working through what should have been a simple assignment, but my research was turning up weird results.

Suzanne: Does Yahoo Ads not exist anymore?
Nancy: What do you mean?
Suzanne: I only see things about “Yahoo 7” and I’ve never heard of that. And maybe a merger with Bing? And a split? Even Wikipedia isn’t giving me a straight answer.
Nancy: https://advertising.yahoo.com/solutions/search-advertising
Suzanne: Why did that not come up in my search?

Because Google.com.au. In fact, I searched through the first three pages of results to make sure I wasn’t crazy. I saw the Digital Firefly Marketing Yahoo Ads services page before any sign of the link Nancy shared with me.

We already knew that Google.com.au gave different search results than Google.com. Since we’re an American company with American clients, this slowed my research when it came to location sensitive projects. It made others impossible. Negative content monitoring has to be done from the version of Google where the client is based. (A move to Australia might have worked out for Gavin.)

Several Google searches later (US and AU), Nancy and I hammered out a solution that worked perfectly. We accomplished this despite being, quite literally, as far away from each other as two people can be on earth.

How to Force Chrome to Use Google.com

Here’s how to convince Chrome that you are in the US (rather than Australia or elsewhere).

1 -Click on the Chrome menu icon (the three vertical dots on the right side of the search bar) and choose Settings.

2 – Scroll down to this box:

3 – Click on Manage search engines to see your current list of defaults. On the right side below the list of default search engines, click Add.4 – This will open the following window so you can create a new profile for Google searches. Name it something other than Google. For keyword, add “google ncr_”, which indicates this as Google with no country redirect. This string turns off personal search, sets your location to the US and redirects based on this info. For quick cut-and-paste, that bottom field should be: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=cr 5 – Save these settings and then hover over the dots at the end of the line to expand the menu and choose Make default.

Once you’ve saved and backed out of these setting menus, restart your browser. Next time you use Google, it will search the US version.

Digital Firefly Marketing Teamwork

This is a great example of our teamwork at Digital Firefly Marketing. There are bound to be hurdles with offices on opposite sides of the globe, but we always collaborate to find effective solutions. As with all challenges, we take it in stride. For all the jokes about my being upside down or sharing my home office with a scary spider (he’s nice and his name is Carl), I still feel like I’m part of the team.

In the US, Digital Firefly Marketing has offices across six states and the District of Columbia. We don’t have a physical watercooler where we gather every afternoon. Still, we we’ve fostered a culture of excellent communication and commitment to innovation. To learn more about how we work, keep an eye out for our next Firefly Feature.

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