I am in Toronto right now and found that I could not get to Google.com. Instead, I kept getting redirected to Google.ca no matter what I did, including:

• putting Google.com into my browser’s address bar
• searching for Google.com and clicking the Google.com result
• searching for Google and clicking the Google.com result
• changing the Google.ca URL to Google.com in the browser address bar

For the most part, it was not an issue. For if I, for example, was looking for restaurants, a list that skews towards Canadian restaurants was just fine. However, it is not good if you are, for example, researching shopping in the US.

How to stop your Google.com address from redirecting

I found a couple solutions for this:

1) www.google.com/ncr

Just put www.google.com/ncr (which means “no country redirect). into the browser’s address bar. This is the easiest, quickest way (as long as you can remember the address).

And, once you have added the /ncr extension, your browser cookies get set. So, the next time you put in google.com, you will NOT be redirected to google.ca.

2) NoCountryRedirect (NCR) Chrome Extension for Chrome

The NoCountryRedirect (NCR) Chrome Extension for Chrome automatically adds the /ncr extension to google.com and blogspot.com, so you don’t get redirected to Google.ca and blogspot.ca.

However, since the /ncr address sets a cookie that will take you to google.com the next time you search, this seems like a bit of an overkill.

Just remember that there are times when using the country's Google is helpful. For those times, just use the country's domain extension, such as Google.ca, and put that directly into the browser address bar.