Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 91 posts

Re: Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

#31

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

Re: Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

#32

Post by shadowgovt »

Kwpolska wrote: post #15

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).

The problem is that technical users aren't Google's target audience.

Re: Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

#33

Post by no_no_no_no »

drnick1 wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Try https://kagi.com/

I would never pay for search. The obvious solution here to browse behind Tor or a VPN, or to physically move to an English speaking country if you want to live in a 100% English environment.

[dead]

Re: Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

#34

Post by theodric »

I noticed that Reddit behavior recently, but not the other things. I searched for " 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.

Re: Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

#35

Post by shadowgovt »

SyrupThinker wrote: post #23
drnick1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Set up a VPN to your own home/office.

FWIW the decision-makers at Google (and some other companies) should just learn what the Accept-Language header is for.

They know. They also know that almost no regular users know what it is, what it's for, or how to configure it. The search fails where the accept-language was wrong far dominate the numbers over the search fails where the accept-language was ignored.

Re: Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

#37

Post by tambourine_man »

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.

Re: Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

#40

Post by estebarb »

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.

Post reply on HN