Okay! I think I have an answer for you. I found this:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WdHknYu...

This is an HTML page on a WordPress site. A hacked WordPress site. It's SEO spam and is rather successful. It's not a proper page and so has no title, but has all the keywords for a search and a bunch of links at the bottom that it's trying to rank higher for whatever search.

This isn't Google's fault necessarily but rather there are compromised WordPress sites out there that look fine to the owner, but when the referrer is Google, or the user-agent is the google bot, the website produces different results than if a human is viewing it.

About a year and a half ago almost half the results I was getting consisted of those. Most of them were on `.it` TLDs, and I've been blocking all those results since.

There is an official Google publication on this phenomenon that was published a really long time ago, but I'm unable to find it anywhere. Would anyone reading this perhaps know where to find it?

This is interesting. Just the other day I did a search on DDG and had the same thing happen, a full page of .it TLDs that vaguely matched what I was searching for. This is the only time I have seen that and unfortunately I don't remember what search terms I used, probably something related to my recent video card issues.

I can't repro. Can you try in a fresh profile with no extensions installed?

Pulled up the results in incognito and can't repro either. The only extensions I'm using are Bitwarden, uBlock Origin, and React Dev Tools so I don't expect those to be the root cause, however.

I would check for whether there are any extensions that you might not be aware of by going to chrome://extensions. I'd also try installing those same extensions on a fresh profile to see if some configuration inside one of them is causing this.

That last one pulled one up for me, linking off to scorzsportscenter dot com

For what little it's worth, aside from some schadenfreude, it didn't pull up the spam link on DDG. ;)

Can you show a screenshot? As you should know, Google returns radically different results depending your user account, region, etc.

We don't show radically different results based on user account. Region, however, can make a difference, though everyone in the same location doing the same search would generally see the same things. More: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520

Thanks for replying on HN! When I do want local search results from a different location abroad than where I am located at I have found no other way than using a VPN ending in that country. Is there a simpler solution?

Google is notoriusly bad add respecting my browser language. I more often than not get the login page in languages different than my browser language. (I only log in when I really want to use some personal service, which is not that often).