Nowadays you need to VPN to the target country. For a reason to complicated to explain here I searched local businesses in the city of Melun, France. There were no reasonable hits. Well, my IP was Finnish (to my best knowledge they have no other means of localizing me) and "melu" means noise in Finnish with "melun" being a common form. No addition of French shopping terms could convince Google that I am not interested in noise abatement. Accepted language header did not help. After switching to a French IP it worked like a charm. And one would guess searching for shopping and businesses would be Google's strength.