[scrollaway]

Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city / area. I speak French. And I don’t want results in French, I want results in English.

Google thinks they known better - they do not.

[laurent92]

The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality, tech articles are dumbed down, tutorials in French lose nuance, and, well, good luck finding Hacker News in French. It was a revolution for me when I gained access to the English web, it’s the origin of the documents! I want results in English because the quality is higher in English!

[yodsanklai]

>The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality

It depends. It is definitely the case for tech but not for everything. For philosophy, science, movie reviews, cooking, and of course anything related to French culture, there's a lot of high quality content.

[tharkun__]

Disclaimer: Choosing to reply here for "reasons" but there's lots of siblings I could've chosen.

Reading comments so far and the article I think we're mixing up many different use cases and choices.

If I set my browser to English, that means I want the interface language to definitely be English. Do no serve me the interface in Japanese just because I'm in Japan. I won't even be able to find the "Change language here" dropdown ...

Now search results are a different thing. If I type something into www.google.com while being on US soil with en-us as my language setting that is in French, isn't it obvious that I might primarily be served French language content and that is what I want too? While the interface of Google is still in English? Or vice versa? If I type an English language query into www.google.fr while fr-fr is my language setting, I expect worldwide results in English, while my interface is still in French. Sure, restaurant name search results I might want sorted differently based on location and that's a good thing overall, but leave my interface language alone!

[porknubbins]

This was one disillusionment of finally becoming fluent in a foreign language. I had kind of assumed all major languages would have similarly sized, disjoint bodies of content worth reading but English dominates everything, especially if the info is of any practical use, and only for particular cultural issues do we need to read in another language.

[amaccuish]

I think I was pretty lucky with the languages I chose. Whilst I find little good French content, the German and Russian webs are pretty well stocked.

[Foobar8568]

It's not just Google, all of them, Switzerland /German by default including the information to switch language every where

[kolinko]

If you're logged into a Google account, you can change the language in settings. (I'm in Poland, and I force Google to be in english this way)

[thih9]

The original article mentions that, as well as some shortcomings of this method.