Intro
I’m trying to measure the speed of a NJ Transit train that really hauls past my station. I’ll compare results using two different methods, but no fancy equipment like radar guns. Just a Smartphone a ruler and some common sense.
To be continued…
But Google thinks we are:
$ curl -i http://www.google.com/
returns:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found Location: http://www.google.com.br/?gws_rd=cr&ei=nrA4UoPZB8fb4AP3loGYAg Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info." Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 19:42:22 GMT Server: gws X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Alternate-Protocol: 80:quic Content-Length: 262 Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Connection: Keep-Alive Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=9ed4d9e91767f4ce:FF=0:TM=1379446942:LM=1379446942:S=O9jxL9sXRCc0kF-E; expires=Thu, 17-Sep-2015 19:42:22 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com Set-Cookie: NID=67=BJA1pj-o2tu-IDI9KS5MjQvoKPJoY8x3uREAmeGCItGKxxfovFqdjPhvBaHUHcISFLVcTWSmCXwiTAuVhF4DIYCbPcuubfBBEGYaNy2wgveeyvGj35xTzM4Oo-yCLaDe; expires=Wed, 19-Mar-2014 19:42:22 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly <HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"> <TITLE>302 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY> <H1>302 Moved</H1> The document has moved <A HREF="http://www.google.com.br/?gws_rd=cr&ei=nrA4UoPZB8fb4AP3loGYAg">here</A>. </BODY></HTML> |
and MSN is similar:
$ curl -i http://www.msn.com/
HTTP/1.1 302 Found Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store Pragma: no-cache Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8 Location: http://br.msn.com/?rd=1&ucc=BR&dcc=BR&opt=0 P3P: CP="NON UNI COM NAV STA LOC CURa DEVa PSAa PSDa OUR IND" X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 S: BN2SCH030301048 Edge-control: no-store Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:02:42 GMT Content-Length: 172 Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Connection: Keep-Alive Set-Cookie: MC1=V=3&GUID=7173a7e9bb5444fc88d52c3d302f0cdf; domain=.msn.com; expires=Thu, 17-Sep-2015 20:02:42 GMT; path=/ Set-Cookie: MC1=V=3&GUID=7173a7e9bb5444fc88d52c3d302f0cdf; domain=.msn.com; expires=Thu, 17-Sep-2015 20:02:42 GMT; path=/ Set-Cookie: brdSample=89; domain=.msn.com; expires=Thu, 17-Sep-2015 20:02:42 GMT; path=/ blah, blah <html><head><title>Object moved</title></head><body> <h2>Object moved to <a href="http://br.msn.com/?rd=1&ucc=BR&dcc=BR&opt=0">here</a>.</h2> </body></html> |
Now a request from the IP Next door to it, on the same subnet, produces an entirely different result:
$ curl -i http://www.google.com/
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 19:48:11 GMT Expires: -1 Cache-Control: private, max-age=0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more in fo." Server: gws X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Alternate-Protocol: 80:quic Transfer-Encoding: chunked Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Connection: Keep-Alive Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=0e280a6247dbe89f:FF=0:TM=1379447291:LM=1379447291:S=Ws_EoUItgwgQMFLL; expires=Thu, 17-Sep-2015 19:48:11 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com Set-Cookie: NID=67=MEOnbrr2pgKz8MVKEzIQ2v9f4nkR0o5FXJxbeBRk3GZg6GsfKNRZm9UEHTzcuRF5A6D2kXKa4N6FQnP88fkVLrgDokdOlXvX1Oba2JzC koZ0K0PiACYSiTPCru5eH9C3; expires=Wed, 19-Mar-2014 19:48:11 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly <!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage"><head><meta content="Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features ... |
This is a problem when you do searches in which you expect to get localized results, like a search for dinner. Believe me, you see completely different things if Google thinks your IP is in Brazil.
And some services simply shut themselves off. Pandora simply does not work, for instance.
What is going on?
It seems some Geo-location service has incorrectly tagged our IP as Brazil. Not sure how to fix that…
Google does have an IP location change form, but they say it will take a month for them to make the change. That hardly seems like Internet time! https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip And what about the others? I don’t see any simple fix for Pandora for instance.
Possible solution?
Someone suggested that the proxy has cached Google’s home page. This is one thing I didn’t test for. However, these proxies are very sophisticated and know to refresh popular pages frequently so I very much doubt that was the cause of the problem.
Workarounds
Google present a link Google.com in the lower right corner of the page which you can click on to pop you to the English-language version of the site, but it’s still not location-aware and treats you more as an English traveler in Brazil when you search for a generic term like restaurant.
You can also go to http://www.google.com/ncr. I personally haven’t tried it, but that’s a tip I just received.
Oct 30 update
Well, finally, after filling out the IP change form twice, and of course keeping all Brazilian users off that proxy, Google has finally deemed fit to declare our proxy really is in the US after all.
It happens again…
Some light usage by a fraction of the user base and I find all proxies are in Brazil yet again. I fill out the form March 19th 2015 and a couple times after that. Now it is May 11th and Google still has not acted. This time I have not kept Brazil users off the proxies, because really this is ridiculous. When users complain I urge them to use duckduckgo.com for its better privacy protections. June 24th update. I’ve been checking every week just about. I’ve filled out Google’s own form about four times in total. So finally after three months, Google set us back to US Enlgish. Without a word to us, of course. Incredible.
Google has gotten big and unresponsive.
Conclusion
Use duckduckgo.com.
References and related
A good web site to learn where your IP is without too much malvertising that you often get with these kinds of things is: https://ipinfo.io/