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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

I see this a little differently. When I'm in a different country like Japan and I search for something, the results are very relevant.

When I go home to the US and search "something Japan" or "something site:*.jp" the results are worse than useless and completely different from what I get in Japan.

The internet is supposed to be our universal bridge, but here it is unwittingly segmenting us into fractured universes presented as uniform.

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It's a bit annoying that the default it like that, but you can change it. On the Google search results page, click on the gear button, go to `Search settings`, and set `Region Settings` to Japan.

Which for whatever reasons doesn't really work very well. You can request that the region be different, but it doesn't seem that the setting is uniformly respected or doesn't work in a useful way.

I ran into this when I was stuck using a connection that was detected as non-USA and was shared by people who would also be non-USA. I gave up using google search because I just could not get google anything to respect my requested region in a useful way. Even google maps on the web was problematic because it would constantly try to move the view right back to where it thought I was. It's quite annoying to search something like "$food near Massachusetts, USA" and get a list of stuff in Mexico one week and Canada the next.

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