Google no longer lets you change domains to search different countries
theverge.com
theverge.com
One thing Google has traditionally been poor at is supporting people who speak two or more languages. I'm a German living in London, and I already had a hard time getting results in German if I wanted them (often, I go to Wikipedia directly).
Changing my location in Google's settings, as described in the article, did not make a difference. Adding &hl=## (e.g. &hl=de ) to a search results ULR still works though.
Not ideal...
I have all computer/browser locales set to US English, Google uses that but I remain on the .cz site. Works flawlessly.
Maps on it are still awful, so for the moment my cell is using Google.
Obligatory plug: startpage
Strange, since this morning my searches suddenly show a google.ae domain. That is something right to left Arabic I think, because I cannot make sense of it... I live in Portugal BTW and only speak North-European languages...
These kind of things happen sometimes (location and language mixups). It makes me wonder what kind of profiles Google has on me and probably a lot of other people. Its more worrying what this kind of major errors possible means to governmental institutes which are probably keen on small details...
The location is pretty reliable, unless you share your IP address (and the few hundred addresses either side of yours) with people from another place.
Isn't there an old browser language setting standard that never really got used? Seems better than a special search setting for Google and another for every other site.
From the article:
>If for some reason you don't see the right country when you're browsing, you can still go into settings and select the correct country service you want to receive. Typing the relevant ccTLD in your browser will no longer bring you to the various country services—this preference should be managed directly in settings.
Sometimes I want results in my mother-tongue, sometimes I want results in English. And I expect my search engine to have a way to quickly specify that without going into the settings each time.
For me, French is my mother tongue and I live in France. So, there's lots of things that I'd want to research that are specific to France (laws, culture, geography etc.) and then obviously, if you speak French fluidly, you get much more precise and detailed information for these in French texts.
If you're lucky, the English text is just a bad translation, but more often than not, the English text assumes that you must be some guy from a foreign country that really doesn't care about specifics and instead just wants an overview.
On the other hand, if I need to look up technical information or most international science, then English is the lingua franca, what gives you the best results in most cases.
In some cases, I'll even try both languages, just to make sure I'm not missing any useful information or to gauge which language gives better results (for example when a globally usable technology happens to be exceptionally popular in France).
Are searches originating from other countries undisturbed? Or does the right to be forgotten also police what non-European citizens can see in their own countries?
That makes the world such a diverse place again.