Here is a slightly different question, how do you get "no country redirect" to stick reliably?
I cant begin to describe how annoying it is that I am presented with a different language when travelling to a different country. All I ever want is Google in English but it keeps going back to a localized search regardless of the many times that I choose "google in english"
Good question. I just saw an expert in the hallway and asked him. The basic answer is that your preference is stored in a cookie, so the preference would be forgotten if you're clearing cookies. If you still have the same cookie and yet the "no country redirect" isn't sticking, that's a bug we could dig into.
By the way, I asked why the "no country redirect" isn't stored with your Google account rather with a cookie. The main reason he gave was that whether to do a country redirect is one of the first things we decide, and it's faster to use a cookie for that than to go looking up the user's account setting. Or at least, cookies have been faster up until this point. Hope that helps explain things.
I regularly see this without clearing cookies, so yes, I would consider this a bug.
There seems to be no discernible pattern as to why it works in one session, suspend laptop, go somewhere else and it stops working. Or it'll work twice in a row and when I return location a (both in the same foreign country), it stops working.
Interesting. HN isn't ideal for debugging, but if you wanted to send cookies or IP addresses (e.g. via Twitter), I could see if someone could look into it.
FANTASTIC TIP! This drives me (and 3 co-workers who will want to buy you a beer) insane - I travel a lot, and use proxies - so google is constantly swapping languages on me.
Though it makes me less worried about them collating all my personal information if they can't figure out I didn't suddenly learn to speak German ;)
Cant easily do this as i am currently in country. Can you shoot me a contact email (mine is HN username @ gmail) and I can send you something when I'm on the road again and can send you cookies/IP
This annoys me more than anything - not just google, but for a large and growing number of sites. They completely ignore your browser settings and select language based on IP address. I installed the google international search plugin from mycroft which has solved my problem with google - but still suffer the myriad of other sites that ignore my browser's config.
I think in the past we saw a lot of people with their Accept-Language header set wrong, which is why we haven't used it. But we've been having a good discussion internally about the "my language won't stick" issues raised on this thread.
How practical would it be to initially trust Accept-Language but also prominently display a link to change to the language detected through IP geolocation (with an easy way to hide/decline the link)?
Some of the time it doesn't, e.g. now when Google has custom logos I'll get a search term in Dutch (I'm in The Netherlands) when I click on it, even though I'm using google.com in English when doing so.
I cant begin to describe how annoying it is that I am presented with a different language when travelling to a different country. All I ever want is Google in English but it keeps going back to a localized search regardless of the many times that I choose "google in english"