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.