Google has several location-related settings affecting the search results:
- It relies on your IP address to figure out your location, even if you search in incognito
- You can set a country (“region”) in the Advanced Search Dialog
- You can set a language, and if it is not English, the setting will positively affect searching in that country.
(Google also has country domains like google.com.ua, which affect results only in a minor way.)
In X-Raying LinkedIn, you can use the two-letter country abbreviation, like site:fr.linkedin.com/in, to narrow down to that country.
Virtually traveling, combining the above tips, you can narrow down a search to a location with nice precision. Virtual travel skills help to source both locally and globally – as you will see in a minute.
Non-US Locations
While using a country abbreviation under the site: operator guarantees that the results will be based out of it, you might be missing some results that Google indexed under “www” and not “fr.” Narrow down to the region of France to see extra results: site:linkedin.com/in. The URL addition for virtual travel to France is &cr=countryFR.
Set the language to French to see even more additional results.
Change your IP address to a French-based with TunnelBear or SurfShark VPN and combine – get more results.
US Locations
While there is no sure way to find only US-based profiles, narrowing to the US in the advanced search settings helps quite a bit. Look – site:linkedin.com/in paris france – most results will be in the US, due to the “region” setting, in spite of the rare keywords.
Globally
If you are searching globally, you have just learned how to expand the number of total results you can get for a search. It works just like we did with the image search, i.e., searching in different categories and combining results. “Move” from one region to another, and the sky is the limit!
I have yet to run some searches and numbers but can see that overlap between regions is small, so it is promising.
Conclusion
- Setting a region in the advanced search dialog combined with changing your IP address to that country’s helps to narrow to local results
- Searching globally, change the region and IP settings repeatedly to develop a long list of results
(If you were wondering, Bing is largely insensitive to your travel.)