Weird

November 7, 2007 5:16 PM

Why do I only get UK You Tube?

No matter what I write in the address bar, it directs me to uk.youtube. I don't understand!

posted by generic230 to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

May I be the first to ask the obvious - are you in the UK?
posted by champthom at 5:21 PM on November 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm in the U.S. and this happened to me a few weeks ago.
Clearing my cookies and cache fixed it.
posted by korres at 5:22 PM on November 7, 2007

Response by poster: Champ, that made me laugh. Like genuinely laugh. No, I am not in the UK. Korres, I'm going to do that now and see if it works.
posted by generic230 at 5:41 PM on November 7, 2007

I was momentarily stuck on brazilian (?) YouTube after searching for South American music... but I manually changed the 'br' to 'www' and it seemed to relearn that I was a US viewer, while still delivering the same videos.

I didn't have to mess with cookies or cache, I just retrained the links to go to "www" instead of "br".
posted by foobario at 5:43 PM on November 7, 2007

I'm currently getting Spanish everything. Google seems to think my entire household is in Spain. It's disconcerting, and nothing seems to fix it, so I'm curious about the answers to this.
posted by InnocentBystander at 6:31 PM on November 7, 2007

Maybe related - occasionally Ebay thinks I've moved somewhere; from .com to .uk, even got .fr once - I always just put it down to their re-routing for load / maintenance purposes etc.
posted by DrtyBlvd at 2:05 AM on November 8, 2007

I think with Ebay it has to do with what localized site the user posted a given item you're viewing, and what you click on next. For example, you view an item from Ebay Canada, and then you use the search bar at the top of the page to look for something else, it will search Ebay Canada, and so on and so forth.
posted by loiseau at 3:25 AM on November 8, 2007

You know, my computer always defaults to the Canadian version of web sites, like Ebay Canada, even though I am in the United States. I, like you, found this to be odd, so I used one of those IP address locators (easily found using Google), and I was shocked to see that my IP address is listed as Canadian. Now, I can't imagine why it is, but surely this is why I get Canadian web sites as a default. Maybe you should check yours, and if you find it shows a UK location, perhaps you should contact your Internet service provider and ask them why this happens.
posted by foxinthesnow at 4:34 AM on November 8, 2007

Are you in the UK? Perhaps You Tube sees a UK IP address, and directs you accordingly.
posted by Chia_Earth at 2:49 PM on November 8, 2007

I'm sort of seconding foxinthesnow's answer. I'm in the US, but at work I often get the Canadian versions of sites since our parent company provides the Internet connection and is based in Canada.
posted by hootch at 11:18 AM on November 11, 2007