VPN set to Americas but location seen as Russia by Google
-
dclakes last edited by
I have my VPN on and set to Americas, with bypass search engines off, but google.com sees my location as Russia. If I take the extra step of going into Google search settings and set my location to United States, then it sees my location as Unknown. I think with unknown I am getting the results from North America that I am looking for, but still, this is a strange behavior (from Google Search) because if I switch my VPN region to Europe it correctly sees my location as The Netherlands, and if I switch it to Asia it correctly sees it as Indonesia, regardless of my search settings.
Has anyone had similar issues or can anyone shed some light on this issue? It's not an Opera issue because the VPN is working fine (IP address in Ashburn, VA) but still, this unexpected behavior from Google is breaking or at least causing some issues to Opera's VPN, which is an otherwise great feature.
-
dclakes last edited by
Forgot to mention that I have the same issue on my Windows PC and my Android phone, which is why I thought other users may also be affected, and I am currently located in a EU country in eastern Europe.
-
Swaggysoda last edited by
@dclakes I'm also having the same problems too and I don't have the VPN enabled which is extremely concerning and this is also happening on my android.
-
-
-
dclakes last edited by dclakes
Data saver no, I never use it. Do you also get a different country, far away from your IP address?
I just tested the VPN with microsoft com and it works just fine. When the IP address is in the US (77.111.246.51) I get the US site, when the VPN is set to Europe the Dutch site and so on. It's only Google and YouTube so far that ignore the IP address from the VPN and set my location to Russia, and by the way I am nowhere near Russia (like 1000 km away).
-
Big-Succ-87 last edited by
@dclakes Yeah I have this issue too, I thought only my shit was busted because I saw nobody else talking about this. It started when my Youtube page kept saying RU when my optimal location was in somewhere Africa so I swapped to America to see if that'd fix it (It did not) and the funny part is that I'm American.
-
dclakes last edited by dclakes
@Big-Succ-87 thanks, that was helpful. I thought the issue may be related to the connection between EU and US being routed through a RU server but if you had the same issue with location set to Optimal then it can't be. Turns out that it has been reported on Google Search Help as early as last January. The root cause is that Google is more and more focused on showing you local results and they switched to IP to determine location, but for some reason this can lead to the wrong country being detected. When this happens, you can still go into each app settings and set your region to the country matching your IP address, which kinda worked the first time I tried it (I got unknown location) but now it did (I get a SoCal location, not exactly Ashburn, VA but at least in the same country). Same thing in YouTube, so with all Google services it's no longer enough to set your VPN in Opera, you need to go an extra step and set the region in the settings of every app you use to match the IP address of your region. Hopefully this solution will hold.