www.google.com/ncr
'ncr' here stands for no country recognition. It allowed many expats to do technical searches without the noise of regionalization results.
Of course someone clever at google figured out that was probably too useful and now it just redirects you back to google.com because screw all those niche use-cases.
When you were in a different country (e.g., India), and you typed in google.com out of habit, it would recognize your IP-geo and redirect you to the country-specific domain (e.g., google.co.in).
If you really just wanted google.com for whatever reason, then you'd type google.com/ncr. It then wouldn't redirect you based on your IP-geo, and you'd stay on google.com.
In other words, google.com/ncr _always_ redirected you back to google.com. Then, and now.
However you can see from the comments in both android police [0] and reddit [1] that, irrespective of your assertiveness, the behaviour did indeed change at least in 2017 if not more times before.
It at the very least used to preserve the suffix and absolutely respect no regional results. It's the same as the old bolean operators, google claims the behaviour is unchanged but will silently ignore them.
[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/27/changing-googles-do...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/4xda1p/googlecomncr...