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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Dear Google,

My browser (and by my browser I mean YOUR browser) is sending the header 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8' on every request, because it is configured to prefer pages in English.

Therefore, THIS is not what I want to see when I load a page: http://imgur.com/AcugEjZ

Please stop detecting language based on IP when there's a perfectly good setting for it. People travel, you know? You do it on Blogger too - shame on you. :/

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I wish Google catered to user preferences in this.

I am from Spain, but often strongly prefer to search for stuff in English (for example for news, as I want to avoid the hyperpartisan Spanish media). No matter what I do: even if I have the browser configured in English, Google configured to use English, and I go to google.co.uk instead of google.es, I type e.g. "Trump" in the search box and most of the results are in Spanish. I do get some English results, but on page 2.

The world is multilingual, actually there are estimates that over 50% of the world population is at least bilingual (even if this is not the case in the US, where the proportion is about 25%). You have an awesome search engine, is it that hard to add an option to choose the language or languages in which to search (possibly changing between searches, as we actually use different languages for different stuff, e.g. I teach in Spanish but do research in English) and then showing results in those languages unbiased by language?

PS: funnily enough, I see this particular page about the gnome in English.

I get the feeling that to a lot of americans, the concept of speaking more than one language is something wierd and unusual. If it happens, it's mostly because auf migration from one country to another. And if someone learns another language to a fluent level without moving to a different country it's an impressive achievement.

It isn't weird, almost all Americans study a second language in high school (or earlier). But it is unusual to achieve any facility with a second language, outside of Spanish in LA or Miami.

No, it is different, and it applies to most of the anglosphere outside of dual-language countries like Canada. In most of the non-english-speaking western world, almost everybody studies English as a second language and a lot of people study a third language in high school.

Yep I had this feeling too that we've got american standards on software. I switched to Safari when Chrome wanted to translate every page I read in English.

You should be able to disable this behavior in settings by searching for translate

chrome://settings/search#translate

and deselecting `Offer to translate pages that aren't in a language you read`. Or maybe you tried it and it didn't work as expected?

It's something Chrome does by default when you browse a site in a language that is different from your system's.

My OS is set to French and Chrome ask me to translate English webpages in French.

They do. 2 to 4 years back they finally after many years managed to follow user settings. You need to change your language in 3 different places (account, security and Google plus iirc) but it works for me to show everything in English even though I usually love in Germany

Also ridiculous: if I search "weather Copenhagen" the information is displayed in Fahrenheit and mph, which is completely useless to me. I've found no way to change this.

I'm in Denmark, the browser sends en-IE.

What happens if you try in DuckDuckGo?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=weather+in+Copenhagen&t=lm&atb=v55...

Fahrenheit and MPH too, from Sweden.

Here in the UK it shows as Celsius and m/s

MPH would actually make sense here but they don't even use that. Really strange.

[EDIT]: I just tried it in a private tab and sure enough get Fahrenheit and MPH. It can't be that hard for them to localise this.

There is a setting under settings tab in DuckDuckGo called units of measurement. Everyone can change it.

If I search for "weather" on http://www.google.com, I get the weather in Portuguese (Portugal). However, if I perform the same query on http://encrypted.google.com, I get the weather in Portuguese (Brazil).

I'm on a VPN out of Tampa Florida and I see the same page but in Spanish. Shakin' my head.

Google is really bad with this. This is especially annoying as an expat who doesn't speak the local language. I'm really glad I switched away from Google a long time ago (using startpage.com for search).

When I was an expat, I used to use google.com/ncr ("no country redirect") to avoid being redirected to a results page I couldn't understand.

Duckduckgo has this solved, with a regions option at the top of the search results and cookies that save your choice.

Not useful for the Google April fools joke though.

I wonder how many people there are with browsers sending en-US but who want non-English results.

The current behavior might make more people happy, at least in the short term.

Well, it's their browser. If it's doing that (requesting en-US rather than OS locale) when it shouldn't, they ought to fix it.

While that would be ideal, from Google's point of view the number of travelers is so small that it might be more sensible to cater to the native users. Also, on average they are less likely to know how to change these settings or that such settings even exist.

Native users who have their locale set to English often also prefer websites to serve them English, at least until they ask otherwise.

And such people most certainly know how to change the setting, or that the setting in question exists. After all, they did change the locale in their OS (or installed an English version of it, instead of the one localized for their market).

If I search in English, why the hell would they display local results? Makes no sense.

Used to be you could use Google.com, and later Google.ca or co.uk (because .com started auto-redirecting to your local tld), but not anymore.

Is that not controlled by the OS locale settings? Or are non-English-speaking people just using their computers entirely in English?

I don't think there are many. Typically the browser gets the locale from the OS, and the OS is sold with the locale of the place where it's bought. I don't think I know anyone who has the browser in en-US without their knowledge.

Almost everybody with pirated Windows.

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