Previously, users used country code top-level domain names (ccTLD) like ‘google.co.uk’ or ‘google.co.in’ to get search results from UK or India respectively. From now on, you will just get the search results best suited for your location. These location-based results will be available for Google Search and Maps.
About local search results from Google
In their blog post, Google has pointed out that ‘around one in five searches on Google is related to location’. Based on this claim, location-based search results are mainly aimed to increase the relevance of search. However, if you want to know the results from some other location, you can do that too. Now when using Google Search, you will see the country service you’re using on the bottom-left of your screen. In case you want to change your results to some other region, you can go to the ‘Settings’ screen at the bottom-right side, select ‘Search Settings’ and change your region to get other country’s results. This localized search is new to Google Search and Maps but YouTube and Gmail were always working this way. By introducing localized search, Google has just made their platform uniform. Despite this change, Google says this change will not affect the way they handle obligations under the national law. Talking to The Verge, Google has revealed that if some results are removed from a particular location, you will not be able to see them even by changing your location in settings. For example, if you search for something that is removed from Google India’s search results, then you won’t find the removed results even if you change your location to some other country.