[mcv]

> These users will still want Google to return results in their native language.

Says who? This is a baseless assumption.

Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for. And the browser should ask the OS or the user for their language preference. And if IT-support wants one language for the interface in order to facilitate support, they can still set the other language for browser preference.

Just ignoring all settings and making blind assumptions will guarantee you will be wrong many times.

[yongjik]

> Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for.

In case you haven't noticed: Users lie. All the time. Every day.

If Google found that "just listening to the settings in the HTTP request header" helped more users than it hurt, Google would have switched to using it a long time ago. The web is a messy place - sometimes you can't even trust a website to report its own encoding correctly.

[littlecranky67]

> Says who?

The browser setting that every browser sends to any server it requests data from. Usually this defaults to the system language, but you can add more languages with a priority. Mine is English (prio 1), German (prio 2), yet I for some reason get tons of spanish content as I am going back and fourth between countries these days just based on Geolocation.

[lostcolony]

I think you're indirectly agreeing with the parent (and great-grandparent); both are saying "Google (and others) shouldn't just use the IP; use the browser's language setting, and if that hasn't been set, the OS setting", which you also seem to be agreeing with.

The only one differing is the grandparent, which was asserting first that users might think showing anything other than the local language is an error, and then asserting that users want their native language, and so I'm not really certain what they're asserting since those two are not always the same (maybe that the first is the reason Google does it, the second is asserting the preferred behavior, which is nearly agreement, in that the latter is doable via OS or browser preferences).

[wutbrodo]

Google has literally billions of users. There are people who are worse at using computers than anyone you've ever met.

I'm as irritated as anyone when something doesn't cater to "power users". But if we're trying to understand the reason behind the decision instead of just venting, then it's instructive to consider just how computer-illiterate the non-power-user is for a product as massive as Google Search, and how annoying characteristics may be a consequence of trying to satisfy both you and them.

[mcv]

This isn't about power users. This will affect anyone who finds themselves in a country with a different language. Migrants, expats, refugees, people on vacation, people living in a country with multiple official languages; there are a lot of people for whom Google's way of handling this will give bad results. And it gives bad results in a way the user can't fix. If Google listened to the language settings, the user would have some control over it.

[unreal37]

It's a setting that you can't change. You can't override it. You can't say "yes I'm really really really sure I want Google to always be in English."

It's beyond nuts. And "catering to the computer illiterate" can't be the explanation.

[netsharc]

At least for google.com, you can use google.com/ncr to get it[1] in English (just tested in incognito mode from a non-English location).

[1] it = the front page. No guarantees that it'll work for other parts or other Google sites like Google Maps[2]. I remember noticing years ago that even with the /ncr, when the front page had a doodle, mousing over it still showed the tooltip in the local language. Billions of dollars, and can't even program a website.

[2] Yeah it still gives me my local currency for hotels in Google Maps. I live in country A, I was visiting country B, and I needed to find a hotel in my home country A. I was logged in. Google knows my address and that my account is tied to Country A (because... Play Store region locking for content, blah blah), but it still showed me the hotel prices for the country I live in and was looking for hotels in, in the foreign currency of the place I was currently sitting at. Fuck you very much, Google!

[dagw]

you can use google.com/ncr to get it[1] in English

I just tried, and while the page is in English, the top search results it returned are localized results to the country I happen to live in.