Google has removed the option to filter search results by user location.
This option was previously available under Google’s “search tools” and allowed users to view location based search results as seen from any location specified by the user.
This option was particularly useful for SEOs trying to understand how search results are viewed by different people from different locations.
Google confirmed that this option was intentionally removed due to “very little usage”.
Following this update, a number of blogs suggested using the “near” parameter in Google as a workaround for viewing local search results, although test made by the ZEFO team found that this parameter leads to results that are different from the results that were available using the previous method.