There seems to be no discernible pattern as to why it works in one session, suspend laptop, go somewhere else and it stops working. Or it'll work twice in a row and when I return location a (both in the same foreign country), it stops working.
Though it makes me less worried about them collating all my personal information if they can't figure out I didn't suddenly learn to speak German ;)
https://encrypted.google.com/ncr/search?q=test&qscrl=1
does not seem to be a valid option. Is there a way to pass NCR in a param like ncr=1? Or the fact that Google SSL is used implies use of NCR?
EDIT: It looks like &ncr=1 does work but I'm not sure if this is equivalent to no country redirect.
Right now, this is what I have set up (which also disables personalization)
By the way, I asked why the "no country redirect" isn't stored with your Google account rather with a cookie. The main reason he gave was that whether to do a country redirect is one of the first things we decide, and it's faster to use a cookie for that than to go looking up the user's account setting. Or at least, cookies have been faster up until this point. Hope that helps explain things.