Making Google Chrome’s search default to google.com

On the most useful hack I’m using too often…

 

This post is a bit unusual – I’m going to help you revert the one most annoying feature of Google Chrome – they force you to use the local Google site when searching from the Omnibox. If you’re living outside of the US I’m sure you’ve seen this thing – almost everyone is using a local version of Google. So, in my case it’s been defaulting to Hebrew version of google.co.il (right to left!)

I cannot work like that!!!

I see so many ppl who actually gave up on clicking the ‘Google.com in English’ link every time they open their browser and somehow got used to having their search engine talk to them in Hebrew whatever… Hopefully some day soon someone up there would put this property in the decent checkbox in the options and let it sync to my profile. Pls pls pls.   (no chance!)

Recently it’s got worse: Chrome is now trying to convince me to google in Estonian…

Here’s a simple 1-2-3 guide on how to rid of it.

1-      Close your Chrome browser.

2-      I know you closed it. But it’s most likely still running. So kill any remains of chrome.exe from Task Manager

3-      Open Notepad then open the file Local State under the folder C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data

It’s there. So if you can’t see it change your filer to All-Files or search for ‘*’

4-      Now edit the 2 lines in the beginning of the file where you see the local Google site. Change them to read “.com” instead of the “.co.il” or whatever local version they put you on.

5-      Save and exit

6-      Open Chrome. Search.

Breathe deeply. Your life just got a whole lot better  🙂 🙂 🙂

p.s. They will offer you once in a while to switch – don’t get tempted…

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