81–90 of 91 posts
Disabled Google search page location permissions. Should fix your localized results problem.
That's not how it works at all. It uses geo IP guessing that override user preferences, that's the whole point.
If I don't allow Google to know where I am, I don't get location based responses. This is extremely easy to test in incognito mode.
If I enable it I instantly get things specific to the area I live in.
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…
It used to be the case that if your query was in one language you’d get results in that language but not anymore. I regularly get a mix of multiple languages and even translated stuff. I've even seen multiple AI blocks in the same results page in two different languages.
It's a mess. I don't think anyone at Google knows what's going on anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The search fails where the accept-language was wrong far dominate the numbers over the search fails where the accept-language was ignored. Wouldn't this imply that "regular" users are running their OS and/or browser in a language they do not want to use for search? This seems unlikely to me, or is there some systematic reason that results in this being the case?
As a result, Google learned early on (and numbers continue to suggest it is the case that) an Accept-Language of specifically en-US really means "The user has not chosen a language; fall back to a heuristic."
Not only Google. Duckduckgo does the same.
If you don't want to pay for Kagi: https://duckduckgo.com/
It is the same shit. Dear duckduckgo, when I ask for results in English (or in other language), I mean it.
It looks like those days Google and duckduckgo are also hallucinating. You aske some terms, in a specific order, and get something which has no relation, whatsoever, with the search query.
Almighty Google knows better, you don’t want English, you just don’t know it yourself! No seriously, I’m sure 2026 is the year the finest engineers in the world finally learn about Accept-Language and the fact that physical location != spoken language.
Instead of trying to figure out who has set it correctly first, and then use it if they have, they always default to language and search results for your location.
I can get the location bit: they want/need to show you local ads, so they push local shops to you too (and just maybe, you do want stuff nearby), but language?
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.
With DuckDuckGo, you are being served non-targeted ads. If you go through the trouble of setting anything up to avoid some of the public search engine pitfalls, you are paying with time and effort, and maybe even subscriptions on top like VPN and similar.
Obviously, ad networks want people to have this mindset, and while I have no issue with "stick it to them", it's always going to be an uphill battle.
I actually believe we need distributed and federated p2p search engine built, but trusting the results is hard with that: perhaps this is where blockchain approach (to store hashes of indexed pages?) could bring real value?
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 bot…
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 bot…
You can now select languages to not auto-translate in YouTube settings.