There are many times when you want to see the search results for a specific country or language to see what comes up. Typically the boss asks – how do we rank in Germany for a specific term. If you just jump over to Google Germany and do a search the results are skewed because Google senses, via your IP, that you are in the US or another country and will adjust the results accordingly.
The engineers at Google developed a parameter you can add to your search results that will return local results. So how does this work?
1. Simply do your search as you normally world in your local flavor of Google or on Google.com.
2. Once you get the results page go to your address bar and paste &gl=uk directly at the end of the string in the box.
3. Once added, press enter which would show you the results for the same query but if you were located in the other city.
The following is the full URL syntax for a query on digital cameras done on Google global. When done normally it shows US retailers. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=digital+cameras&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10&fp=aazfVjAAjGM
Adding the “&gl=uk” code returns results that include UK sites and local UK camera retailers that were not included in the Global centric results.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=digital+cameras&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10&fp=aazfVjAAjGM&gl=uk
In order to do this for other countries you need to append the correct 2-letter country code. The official list of 2-letter country codes is located here – http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements
You can do the same thing for a specific language by changing the syntax to the language version which used “hl” rather than “gl” as here — &hl=ja
The official list of language codes can be found here http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php
Note, not all languages use teh same code as their country. For example with Japan, country code is “jp” but language code is “ja”
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