If you’ve clicked the “Go to Google.com” link at the bottom of your local Google Search page, you may have found that all subsequent visits to google.com won’t redirect you to your local equivalent anymore. If you find this irritating (eg. you like to access your local Google by typing google in the address bar and hitting Ctrl+Enter), the popular consensus around the internet is to delete your cookies. This works, but in case you don’t want to delete all your Google-related cookies, the specific cookie you need to remove is named ‘PREF’ and is specific to the ‘google.com’ domain (without the www subdomain).
If one put “google.com/ncr” as home page in his firefox (Tools > Options > General > Home Page:) then it will be permanent. Until his erase /ncr or make another home page.
For a session (until closes firefox) is enough to put “google.com/ncr” in adres bar. The search bar will follow that decision.
I think you missed the point of my post. I’m talking about the second part you mentioned – the session. This cookie doesn’t expire for a while, unless you delete it. My post explains how to do that without deleting all your cookies. Setting Firefox to “end session” on closure involves deleting all your cookies.
It seems it’s now stored in the NID cookie, I think along with other settings like safe search, number of results etc. You can also visit the main Google page or any search result page and there should be a “Use Google.co.nz” (or whatever) at the bottom right. The same place “Use Google.com” is (at least for the main page). Unfortunately finding help about this is very difficult since most results are about people wanting to do the opposite, i.e. activating ncr or disabling country redirect and using the US site instead.
IMO things would be a lot better if companies which are aiming to be global would stop treating the US as a special case and use a .us domain for the US site and use the .com (or whatever) domain as their global site. Or if you really want to use .com as the US site, it should always be the US site. (This may be okay for stuff like Amazon, it’s probably not ideal for something like Google.)
But whatever I guess that’s a pipe dream.
I went to the google.com/ncr as part of investigating another issue and later wanted to undo. I tried deleting the individual cookie and then all of my cookies and even deleted my profile from Chrome (clearing all data) and re-added. However, whatever I did, the cookie came back and a new tab would always open a non-localised Google page. I noticed on the Google Dashboard that once the next sync had occurred the new tab then started to open the correct localised Google page. Phew.