Re: google search redirected to language/country of Tor exit node

[Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 09:38:17AM -0700, OpenMacNews wrote:

> i'm experiencing a bit of oddness with Google Search when using Tor ...

> i'm using FireFox106 thru a Squid+Privoxy+Tor setup on OSX.

> if i navigate to a site while Tor'd, and find that my exit point is,
> e.g.  in Poland, and then enter a search via the Google toolbar, my
> search results page comes up as http://www.google.pl -- in Polish.

> this behavior SEEMS to indepdendent of my google prefs ... set to
> English at the moment.

That's because privoxy will stop your Google cookie from getting to
Google. You can configure it (privoxy) not to stop that cookie, but
then you loose much of your anonymity, he. In this case, you could
even tell firefox/squid not to use privoxy for google.com, if you
don't care about any anonymity for your Google searches.

The "best" solution, IMHO, is to use http://www.google.com/intl/en/
instead of http://www.google.com/ . Note that the trailing slash is
important.

Additionally, Google now seems to - at last!!!! - obey your browser's
language preferences. In your browser's preferences, somewhere, you
can tell it what languages it should ask web sites to give
you. Assuming Privoxy doesn't "scrub" that, too, it should work. (You
can use http://www.debian.org for Google-independent testing. This
website also uses your browser-sent wishes to select the language to
send you.)

See http://www.debian.org/intro/cn for explanations on this, in
particular http://www.debian.org/intro/cn#mozillafirefox .

-- 
Lionel