For some strange reason as I travel down to LINX69 in London the on train wifi is directing me to Google’s Swedish website. It would be interesting to find out whether this is down to the service provider network being used by EastCoast Trains or something happening in the Google network itself.
I guess someone at LINX69 would be able to find out.
6 replies on “Google redirecting to Swedish site”
The service is provided by a Swedish company, Icomera. Backhaul via their infrastructure in Sweden. An geo-IP aware service (like Google) sees the client as being in Sweden.
It’s probably EastCoast Trains’ network provider. A couple of years ago when working with a mobile IT suite, satellite modem & dish in English fields, Google defaulted to google.de and Google Docs had German menus. The reason: Germany was where the satellite signal came back down to earth
It might be unrelated but have you noticed how the Google homepage has, for the past month or two, removed the checkbox option for searching ‘websites in the UK only’ or ‘the world’? Without this to reinforce a specific choice then my guess would be that Google is using IP data for automatic geo-location (country level) matched searching.
Now I can think of all sorts of ways in which this could go wrong on roaming services, especially if some of the transmission are handled by a satellite rout. Certainly every time I try to access Google.com it now redirects me to Google.co.uk , which is most annoying if I want to specify USA websites as a priority of the search. I have to do that in the advanced options now (top right of Google).
Mark
Just looking now (off the train) and my google.com gets redirected to .co.uk iGoogle. That’s not particularly friendly in my mind. Either people naturally adopt iGoogle or they don’t and they shouldn’t be forced there.
Tref
Tref,
Yes I totally agree and get the same annoyance when trying to view the BBC website on my phone, it always redirects me to their crappy mobile variant when my phone’s 800*400 screen is quite happy viewing the full content.
Google’s site in particular is so simple that we don’t really need an “iGoogle” in the first place.
Mark
I believe that the connection is a mix of 3G and satellite.
If things did not change since 2003, satellite connections using Eutelsat finish either in Italy (Turin) or Paris (Rambouillet).
In order for the service to work, the download are sent via satellite but the upload is always via a fixed line – or 3G in the case of EastCoast I guess.
Some tunnelling and proxying is performed to make sure that the return path is well done via the satellite.
I assume Icomera have their proxies in Sweden. So no luck if you want to access the UK only part of the BBC website 🙂