Custom search engine in mobile Safari At the moment I am in mainland China, using an iPad set to British locale.  When I use the search field in mobile Safari, it always loads google.com.hk (not google.com or google.co.uk).

Unfortunately this version of google is often extremely slow or doesn't load at all here, most likely because of the Great Fiewall of China (clicking a search result also asks google's server first, therefore it also takes a very long time).  In contrast, google.com works fast and reliably most of the time.

Is there any way to force mobile Safari to use google.com instead of google.com.hk in iOS 6?  In iOS 5 at least it loaded google.co.uk, which also worked, but now it insists on google.com.hk, and the search settings only let me specify "Google" as search engine, but now a specific version of it.

(Note: I am new to iOS and still getting familiar with it.)
Perhaps not exactly what you were looking for, but if you load Google's main page and it redirects to your local version, you could force it to use .com just by tapping the button on the bottom of the page.