There are dozens of complaints in the Google Web Search Help forums where users who are based outside of the United States are being forced to use their country specific TLDs.
For example, users in Germany are forced to go to Google.de, even though they want to use Google.com. Same with users in the UK, they are forced to use Google.co.uk, even though they want to use Google.com.
One person said the solution is to switch your browser to Chrome and then it might start working.
One user said:
Today morning I had small health issue and was trying to find EN information about it from google.com and google was redirecting me to my local country google page which is terrible user experience I was clicking google.com link at the bottom of the page, removed my cookies still not able to access google.com, not able to find any information which I was looking for.I'm using google more than 8 years and what I can say that all this igoogle, +1, redirects to local google version is total waist of user time, you should make everything simple and fast.
I personally experienced this issue yesterday morning at Frankfurt airport. But I honestly thought that is the behavior, I just didn't know better, since 99.999% of my searchers are done in the US.
Is this a bug or is Google changing how they handle this behavior?
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.