I had to vaporize all cookies in Google Chrome today, because Google kept defaulting to www.google.com.pr instead of allowing me to switch back to www.google.com.

It appears this problem is mostly limited to anyone (and everyone) that pulls up Google while traveling to Puerto Rico. When you travel, Google loads up the in-country version of Google Web Search. When you travel back home, it’s supposed to realize you’re back, and switch back to the default launguage.

I believe the problem lies in that Puerto Rico is both English and Spanish, so Google doesn’t realize when you travel back to the mainland, that you’re in a different American English territory. As such, the options to reset the default Google.com (per their help page), all fail.

Unfortunately, deleting the Google cookie is the only way to work around this that I’ve found consistently successful. And, since web browsers are now made to be overly-simple in handling cookies, I’ll spare you the 20 step guide and tell you to just erase all cookies and you’ll be back to normal. Hopefully Google will offer a help page, with an option that does this just for their own (broken) cookie.

I personally don’t think ICANN should have issued Puerto Rico a nationality suffix in the first place (since, well, it isn’t even a state), as more and more of these similar issues are sure to pop up, as the internet continues its perpetual growth…