uule

uule is the Google Search parameter that pins a query to a specific location. It carries an encoded canonical place name — for example "New York,New York,United States" — and Google treats the search as if it came from that place, down to city or neighbourhood level.

The value is not the plain name. It is a small protobuf structure (a role byte, a producer byte, then the length-prefixed name) wrapped in base64 and prefixed with "w+". Get the length byte wrong and Google silently ignores the parameter, quietly falling back to a coarser location — which is why encoding it by hand is error-prone.

The one hard rule: the place name must match a row in Google's Geotargets dataset exactly, commas and all. A name that is not on that list points nowhere.