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

Asked 2010-02-01T14:21:44.243
13

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 - probably because my server is UK-based.

Is there a way you can stop this from happening? I don't want to remove the CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION option as this is useful for 301 redirects etc.

Part of my code is below;

$ch = curl_init();

    // set URL and other appropriate options
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 5);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FORBID_REUSE, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 4);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 4);

    $output = curl_exec($ch);

    // get data     
$data = curl_getinfo($ch);

$data['url'] contains www.google.co.uk when I set $url as www.google.com

php curl dns libcurl
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2 Answers

0

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.

answered 2010-07-12T13:46:13.703
0

You should turn off the follow location from curl (set it to false) and you won't be redirected anymore ... 

   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
answered 2010-11-24T23:50:04.663

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