I’m going about my merry life and I use google every day.

Today Google decided I’m in China and redirects me to google.com.hk and it shows me all text in Chinese. It’s just another proof how silly it is trying to use the IP address to figure out location (or even worse trying to guess language based on IP address).

Click on the image to get it in its full glory.

I haven’t changed anything locally, but it seems Google has updated (broken) their database somehow.

Just to be perfectly sure my browser isn’t playing any tricks behind my back, I snooped up the headers sent in the HTTP request and there’s nothing notable:

GET /complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl=en-US&q=rockbox HTTP/1.1
Host: suggestqueries.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101209 Fedora/3.6.13-1.fc13 Firefox/3.6.13
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: PREF=ID=dc410 [truncated]

Luckily, I know about the URL “google.com/ncr” (No Country Redirect) so I can still use it, but not through my browser’s search box…