Have you ever wondered what motivates a person to click on the “Follow” button on your Twitter profile?  Some are genuinely interested in your tweets/updates. Others want to expand their social reach and a few may follow you for a free “follow-back.” A simple way to express this can be:

Originally posted 2009-09-29 14:31:47.

Originally posted 2011-06-09 23:14:06.

If you travel internationally and update your Chrome, then your default google domain changes.  So for example, you live in Canada but go to Sweden. There you update your browser and all of a sudden google searches are made on “google.se” instead of “google.ca”. This is frustrating since its the results are usually not as relevant and in a different language.

How to change this in Windows 7

After searching for about 20 minutes, I found the answers in broken pieces. I’ve compiled the answers together for others:

1) Close Chrome

2) With Notepad or Notepad++ open up

C:/Users/**YourUserName**/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data/Local State

• Obviously, replace **YourUserName** with your Windows username
• And yes its “Local State” (with a space in between)
• If you try to browse there using your windows explorer, you may not be able to see the folders. This is because these are hidden files and by default windows has hidden files as… hidden. It’s best just to copy and paste the file location to the windows file browser.

3) Once you’ve the file loaded up, change the last_known_google_url to http://www.google.XX and and also change last_prompted_google_url to http://google.XX

• Where XX is your preferred domain. In my case it’s .ca

4) Save and restart Chrome. Type anything on the address bar  and you should be taken to the Google domain you just set.

How to change on OSX

Same deal as above. Just the location of the file is

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome