I recently stumbled upon these tricks and thought others might find them interesting too; for example, I now know that I’m the top hit for people searching for Seth Holloway in France.

To see results from a different location you can either

  • go to the Google site you’re interested in and append “ncr” to the URL (e.g., https://www.google.co.kr/ncr to see Korean search results) or
  • use the gl=<two letter location> parameter (e.g., https://www.google.com/search?q=blah&gl=KR).

To avoid personalization - add the pws=0 flag

I found a nice example from an SEOmoz article on how to retrieve results for a specific location without actually being in that location:

Use this as a model: https://www.google.com/search?q=your+search+query&pws=0&gl=US (obviously put your search query in where it says your+search+query (separated by plus signs)). Broken down: www.google.com - the search engine you want pws=0 - remove any personalization gl=US - return results as if you were in the US