But what if I don't want the search engine company to know where I am?

(I mean, I don't generally make a big secret of it. But still.)

Then you have to use a VPN and you can always use the cr= parameter to orient the results towards the region you want if your search is location-sensitive.

But I feel like this is quite an unrelated problem, IPs being linked to a country is a fundamental part of the current architecture of the Internet.