Use these simple tricks to base your search on different countries using Google, Bing and Yahoo.

It is a very simple and straight-forward thing to do search on the country you are in. In other words, by default, all the leading search engines try to present you with search results that are specific to the country you are in. But what if you wanted to search stuffs on different countries? What if you do those searches quite frequently and wanted to keep a shortcut to get to it quickly?

Here are some tricks that you can use on the 3 leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing to base your search on different countries.

Google

There are 2 ways to do country specific search in Google. If you know the 2 letter country code you wanted to base your search on then you can use the URL hack to get to the results quickly.

Search as usual using Google.com. Once you are on the search results page you can append &gl= and the 2 letter country code to the URL to get to the country specific search results. Try to remember the parameter “gl” as “geo-location” and “&” is of course needed to append any parameters to the URL.

If you don’t know the country code you can use Google’s “Language Tools” link on the home page (next to the search box) to choose the country you wanted to base your search on. Here is the URL in case you couldn’t find it, http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en. Scroll down to the “Visit Google’s Site in Your Local Domain” section.

Bing

Again, there are 2 ways to do a country specific search on Bing.com. If you know the 2 letter country code you can append ?cc= to the home page URL to do a country specific search.

Visit Bing.com and append ?cc= to the URL along with the 2 letter country code. Try to remember “cc” as “country code” for example. Once you do the search you can notice a new option next to the search box like “Only from Australia” to include results only from Australia for example.

If you don’t know the country code you can click on the country link at the top of the Bing.com page. You’ll be presented with a list of countries Bing.com supports and you can easily choose from the list.

Yahoo

Yahoo does things slightly different. You have to use their “Advanced Search” options to search on a different country.

Do a Yahoo search as usual. On the search results page click on the “Options” button next to the “Search” button and choose “Advanced Search“.

Scroll down to locate the “Country” section and choose the country you want your search to be based on.

If you ever wonder what those 2 letter country codes that I’ve been talking about, here is a list of country codes http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements.

As I said, these tricks would be really helpful if you do a fair amount search outside your country repeatedly. I hope you find it useful.