I was a little surprised when I took a look at Microsoft’s new Bing search engine to see that it thought I was in the United Kingdom when I’m actually in New Zealand. It showed the United Kingdom when I was using Firefox but correctly showed New Zealand with Google Chrome. This post shows how to change the country settings when using Microsoft Bing.
I think probably what it’s doing is using the browser user-agent string as well as geo-targeting to work out which country it should initially tailor your search results to. The version of Firefox I’m using is "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 GTB5" so I’m guessing Bing is seeing the en-GB language and from that is (for some reason) deciding I want UK results instead of using geo-targeting to give me NZ results.
The screenshot below shows with the red boxes where it shows which country Bing is tailored for when you are using it.
![bing showing united kingdom as the selected country](https://electrictoolbox.com/images/content/bing-uk.png)
To change to a different country, click the country name in the top right and Bing will present you with a list of supported countries. Click the one you want and the browser returns to the homepage and the country you have selected will now be showing.