For those travelling with their laptops and have used Google search, you may have noticed that it does a country redirect based on your IP address. For example, I visited the Philippines this past month and instead of the usual google.com, it redirected and used google.com.ph. After getting back to the US, my searches would still redirect to using the .ph version. I even checked that the Search Engines settings (in this case in Chrome/OSX) didn’t have it.

Anyways, in case you run into the same situation, do the following:

1. Open up Terminal
2. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome
3. Open the file “Local State” either w/ vi or a text editor
4. Search for the strings “last_known_google_url” and “last_prompted_google_url” and replace their values to your preferred Google base URL. In my case, “http://www.google.com/“.
5. Save the file and exit
6. Restart Chrome.

That should do the trick. For Windows and other systems, you may check out this page for the steps. Almost the same, just different paths.

Hope that helps.