I’ve not had this problem before, but it’s been going on for days. I have to turn Express VPN off to search Google. Have tried all the U.S. locations and get the same or similar result. It think I’m on another continent.
I thought it was just me. Even tried a different server with no luck.
Hi u/S0_Crates and others here on this thread!
We’re aware that some users are experiencing this and unfortunately most of it comes down to Google having their own custom geo-location database for IPs that we have no ability to influence. We believe this has popped up recently as we are working on addressing the Captcha issue a lot of users have been experiencing, and while our solution is working well so far, it seems the additional IP space and techniques used have brought some location issues with Google itself.
We believe these tend to work themselves out over time as Google’s in-house location data is (again, we believe) based on traffic trends and so the more they see the locations (our VPN servers, not users, to be clear), the more their software leans toward adjusting what it understands to be the IP’s location. This is purely a guess at the moment, because they’re not open about their geo-location identification algorithms, but it’s unique to Google.
Generally we see a lot of organizations / websites using common geo-location DBs you can easily find online. We track these since we can subscribe to them, which allows us to understand and help influence most experiences, but since Google doesn’t use them, it’s very difficult for us to know what Google thinks or how to influence the data they do have.
We’re continuing to monitor and look for ways to improve this more rapidly, but it’s a tricky problem.
Disclaimer piece: I’m not with our Support team, but rather a Director within our engineering department. I engage on Reddit voluntarily, so my responses are not always quick.
Same here, but it thinks I am in Australia, not Atlanta like it should be! Hope they fix this soon. It’s a pain when all websites are showing costs in Australia currently and some sites will not work as they say not supported in your country. Same issues on phone and computer !
The recurring nightmare…
In my case I use: Express VPN, Windows 11, Brave browser, and I have a Google account.
To resolve it, do the following:
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Go to google.com
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Top-right corner, click on the Google Account [round] icon — a menu pops-up
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At the bottom left of that menu (April 2024) is a tab called More Settings, click on it.
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It then brings you to a Google Search Settings page.
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In the left pane you’ll see Privacy & Safety, and Other settings – click on Other settings.
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At the top of the Other settings page is Language & region – click on that, it’ll take you to the Languages & region page.
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On the Language and Region page, at the bottom of the Results language & region section, you’ll see Results region.
If this is set to Current Region and you’re having location issues in your search results, set it to your actual location, in my case the United States. I kept getting a lot of .AU results (again) when I should have been getting US results.
This resolved the issue for me.
I hope it works for you too.
I was having this issue for about the last week or so. I just checked and it seems to be resolved. It was kind of a pain for sure.
If you’re having this issue on mobile, make sure you turn you’re location off! I don’t personally use ExpressVPN, but was having the same problem with my VPN (trying to buy stuff for home while I’m abroad and everything was coming up in local currency).
Turns out Google is just basing results off more than just IP location. Hope this helps other confused searchers like me!