How do I CURL www.google.com - it keeps redirecting me to .co.uk

Question

I am using CURL to check for the existence of a URL (HEAD request) but when I test it with www.google.com, it redirects me to www.google.co.uk - probab

Answer 1

One way to avoid Google from deciding what country you are in, is by setting a different IP address. Just get one of the many US proxy servers from the Web and do something like this:

$ch=curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCTION,1); 
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_PROXY,"8.12.33.159");
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_PROXYPORT,"80");
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3");
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$URI);
$results=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

This way, Google will think you come form a US IP address and not redirect to a local Google.