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Tip: Force Chrome to provide search results in English

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

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Last year, I finally switched my main browser from Firefox to Chrome. As I was already familiar with Chrome,  and because Chrome makes it easy to import bookmarks, settings and account info from other browsers, this switch was fairly easy. But I had one major problem: Location.

Living in Spain, but working and blogging in English, I’d rather not get Spanish Google results for every query. Once in a while, I find them useful. But on the whole, I need US market results which take me straight to English-language websites. Every single time I tried to switch to Google USA or Google NCR (‘no country redirect’), Chrome would chuckle and send me to Google Spain. Without fail.

Fixing it is easy, but it took me a while to find the method that worked. If you’re having a problem with non-English search results pages in Google Chrome, here’s how to force Google to serve US English results instead. The instructions come courtesy of user ‘eyeverve’ on the Chrome support forums:

1. In Chrome, click the wrench icon. (upper-right)

2. Click ‘Options‘ [This item is called ‘Preferences‘ on Macs]

3. Under the ‘Basic‘ tab, select ‘Manage Search Engines‘ in the Search section

4. At the bottom of the list of search engines, you’ll see three fields that allow you to add a new one. Add this info into the three fields in the correct order:

Name: Google US Search
Keywordgoogle.com/
URLhttp://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

(You should paste this link without any breaks or spaces)

5. Hit ‘Enter’ and your search engine should be saved. Finally, hover your mouse pointer over the newly added Google entry to see a button that reads ‘Make default‘ – select this in order to change your default Google search.

Close the preferences tab and test your new Google search by typing a search term into the Omnibox (Chrome’s address and search bar).

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

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