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Google limits my searches to the city/state I live in despite privacy settings?????

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vendors, maps, national and academic resources are limited to the vicinity of my residential area. Privacy settings are set to not track, not save history and not refer to previous searches. I routinely dump any possible cached data, check setting to prevent changes to settings that may have changed without my awareness, and immediately access page information to check myself when this limitation has been imposed by Google. I use gmail but I do not chat, do community stuff, nor do I use Chrome or any other feature Google waves under my nose. Can I stop this? What am I missing?

vendors, maps, national and academic resources are limited to the vicinity of my residential area. Privacy settings are set to not track, not save history and not refer to previous searches. I routinely dump any possible cached data, check setting to prevent changes to settings that may have changed without my awareness, and immediately access page information to check myself when this limitation has been imposed by Google. I use gmail but I do not chat, do community stuff, nor do I use Chrome or any other feature Google waves under my nose. Can I stop this? What am I missing?

Chosen solution

Many sites will geo-locate you by reference to your computer's IP address if they don't have any more specific information to go on. To see how specific that is, you could look up your IP address using a site such as the following:

http://www.iplocation.net/ (don't give permission to use Firefox's built-in location feature, just let the site report what it knows from its own sources)

The only workaround for that is to use a service such as a private VPN to make it appear that your requests originate from a different IP address in some other location. I'm not sure the results will be less annoying...

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hello cthib, websites can detect your approximate location based on your IP address and change their content accordingly - there's not much you or the browser can do about that (except using tor, proxies or vpns to pretend a different IP)...

http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/network-location/

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Chosen Solution

Many sites will geo-locate you by reference to your computer's IP address if they don't have any more specific information to go on. To see how specific that is, you could look up your IP address using a site such as the following:

http://www.iplocation.net/ (don't give permission to use Firefox's built-in location feature, just let the site report what it knows from its own sources)

The only workaround for that is to use a service such as a private VPN to make it appear that your requests originate from a different IP address in some other location. I'm not sure the results will be less annoying...