Just noticed that since changing ISPs, FireFox’s search bar now defaults to the Kazakh Google domain (google.kz) for searches. Any other Kazakh readers out there find this behaviour with FF?
Hmmm, nope, can’t find an online option to prevent this redirection from .com to .kz . Will see if I can hard wire it for .co.uk, and hope no re-directions come into effect that way.
Makes me wonder if Google.kz happens to return any different results from any political search terms, a la China etc. ?
[edit]
OK, removing (temporarily at least), the tin foil hat. It appears that once you click on the link that forces .com to stay as .com (not certain, but I believe the URL ended in /ncr ???), searches are back to normal. Assuming .com searches are not in anyway filtered.
Anyway, how this redirection was re-activated following an ISP change, I’m not certain, perhaps a cookie expiring and/or tied in with an IP address change on our part?
IP address, definetely. AFAIK Google would display you more Kazakhstan-related and/or Kazakh-language results.
It just redirected google.com to google.kz
I can understand how it knew my country via my IP address, I was just surprised that it hadn’t occurred before, when my IP address changed whilst still using the old ISP.
>I can understand how it knew my country via my IP address, I was just surprised that it hadn’t occurred before, when my IP address changed whilst still using the old ISP.
That’s mystery. Sometimes I’m redirected to google.ru, sometimes not.