Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

Generally, I find the country domains behave consistently: I imagine google.co.uk might still give you English as the main language.

But really, Google has been defaulting to a language based on GeoIP data for a long time now.

?hl=en

It’s a pain in the ass when you travel a lot…

I have the same problem and my "solution" is mediocre, but kind of works: use a VPN. I used to set it to the UK, but since the recent developments I've been experimenting with other English-speaking countries. My native language is Spanish, but I live in Japan, and it's odd because I never want Japanese (language) results, but I am fine with Spanish results.

Some times I need to switch to Spain, or Japan, or just disable it due to geo blocking. I use Mullvad, which makes this easier, but TBH the main practical use of my VPN is what you mention, I never want results in Japanese and Google is very bad at getting the hint.

The worst one I keep noticing is MDN, I know there's an article in perfectly fine English but why am I always redirected to the local language one? That's not even location-dependent.

It happens to me all the time too, it's fucking annoying as fucking fuck, it doesn't seem to be a solution

Try https://kagi.com/

Google stopped caring about a good user experience a long time ago, shareholders want more AI slop, not regular searches. I've changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, it's much saner overall (although I sometimes need to fall back to Google with !g for extremely niche topics).

searxng allows me to use various locations

https://searx.space/

> My Google account, my laptop, my phone, my interface language, and preferences are all set to English; only my physical location and payment methods are local.

Your problem start here. Don't give Google your phone number, location, or payment information. Google is a monstrous surveillance machine. If you can't do without Google search for some reason, at least use a VPN or Tor.

Yeah I get this a lot, it's really annoying. You can go into settings on Google search and change it to the specific language and culture you want. However it does reset on it's own from time to time.

A good part of this is locale-based and not language-based - I find that Google will prefer often local (English) results over the canonical English results that I'm actually looking for.

Though I primarily use Kagi now.

e.g. If I search "world's best pizza" the top Google result is a random local pizza joint that isn't even top-5 in my medium-sized city (but who have included "worldsgreatestpizza" in their long URL), and then a bunch of Facebook results. Kagi's top couple results are sites with rankings of (ostensibly) the world's top pizza restaurants.

Same problem. My workaround is to use Yandex instead. In my experience it's consistently returning more relevant results than Google for some time already, and there's less censorship while searching torrent related content.

If you don't want to pay for Kagi: https://duckduckgo.com/

did you try using https://www.google.com/ncr ? that used to work

also https://www.google.com/?hl=en might be effective

Google has a lot of data to see how the average user uses computers. The problem is, that data tells them that the number of people who misconfigure their localization settings (or can't configure them; shared computer) is way larger than the people using those settings on purpose to try and request non-local results. So they err far, far on the side of using your location as a signal of intent over your machine and browser configuration.

ETA: https://www.google.com/advanced_search appears to give options for tuning your language and region in the search results. I haven't used it personally in ages, but it may give you what you're looking for.

I noticed that Reddit behavior recently, but not the other things. I searched for "<productname> Nederland" hoping to find a Dutch source for something I can't get in Ireland, and got a Reddit hit in Dutch that talked about paying €30 for it online with a response talking (also in Dutch) about the thing being $14 at Wal-Mart and Kroger-- neither of which exists in NL. I then noticed the text at the top of the page saying that the post had been auto-translated from English, at which point I got rather annoyed. That €30 in the translated post was $30 in the original: that's not localization at all, rather fabrication. Fucking infuriating.

My theory was that Reddit was shotgunning LLM-translated versions of posts at Google in a bunch of languages to increase hit rate. Maybe Google's really at fault.

Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to find anything on Google thanks to all the transparent autoensloppification of everything, everywhere.

Google is institutionally incapable of understanding that some people can speak multiple languages. Only reliable solution I found is to create one account for each language and restrict the number of available languages to just that one in:

https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1

YouTube is the worst offender these days. I get Portuguese videos auto-dubbed to English and vice-versa even though I can understand both and with no way to disable other than account switching.

It also can't tell Portuguese from Spanish in search queries.

>Reddit results are often force-translated instead of linking to the original English content.

It's very annoying. Put this in a search query to filter them out: -inurl:?tl=

Not only search: titles and description of Youtube videos are being translated. Colab UI is now in Spanish (using technical terms that make no sense).

Some people may want translation, mostly people that only speak a single language. But for most bilingual people, being forced a translation (a lower quality one), is a worse experience. I'm surprised that no one at Google has pushed back this anti-user behavior. It is like no one at Google knows more than one language.

The worst part is when traveling. Google ignores the browser settings, so it throws me Japanese or German website, even if my browser settings clearly says English then Spanish.

I'm currently in based in Medellin, Colombia. This happens to me about 10% of the time, randomly, where the results will be in Spanish. What's more annoying is that my currency selection doesn't persist, and always snaps back to COP when I'm searching flights, etc.

I have the opposite problem with YouTube, where they insist on dubbing everything when in just want subtitles.

The result is an Italian cooking demo where the chef exclaims “MULTA BENE!” and the AI voice deadpans “it is very good.”

I’m sure it’s even more annoying when you’re bilingual and can’t turn it off.

Forcing AI down our throats. Not only Google search, same thing with YT. Make no mistake, there's enough bilingual people employed by Google across US for them to know perfectly well how annoying this is.

This isn't a coincidence. I'd bet this is so they can inflate their adoption numbers to justify further involvement in the AI race to their shareholders.

Which, to me, is a very string sign that we're in a massive "solution looking for a problem" bubble. We've been there before. We know how it ends.

Google search quality has declined significantly over the years. For many of my searches now, I can ask an LLM and get better results faster - especially for technical questions where I just need a direct answer.

Though I suspect this won't last once LLMs start inserting ads and promoted content into responses.

Please look into duckduckgo or other search providers if possible / if you can and your workflow allows it

Other people might have given more credible information about how to fix it but I am on duckduckgo for 2 years now and I seriously love it and It doesn't have any of these issues.

If your workflow allows so, definitely give duckduckgo (Or other private search engines like brave,startpage,ecosia etc.) a try as well.