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by darklajid 4472 days ago
My accept header only contains en-US and en. I tend to get served German content (and Google's especially bad about this).

Please, I hope someone hears your complains and starts fixing things. That issue is highly annoying..

2 comments

> and Google's especially bad about this

Google is a Royal Pain in the Ass on this point. They completely disregard any request configuration and decide on output language based on IP geolocation (which is pretty much always Not What I Want, even more so in multilingual countries such as Belgium or Switzerland[0]), then Chrome "helpfully" suggests translating documents.

[0] where it won't even send you something matching your actual geographical location's language, usually sending the country's most common language — dutch in Belgium and german in Switzerland

I live in Switzerland and google does follow my accept-languages (en-US,en;q=0.8,fr;q=0.6,de;q=0.4). When going to google.com in incognito I get google.ch in english which is what I asked.
I don't get that behavior in Firefox. I have 'en-US' and 'en' as my preferred languages (in that order), set via Preferences->Content->Languages. But when I go to google.com in incognito, I get google.dk in Danish.

I guess English is preferred here commonly enough that it's at least listed as one of the two alternate google.dk languages in an easy-to-find place under the search box, along with Faroese. "Google.dk på: Føroyskt English". And if you click "English" it stays with it for the session. No luck if you wanted something else like German, though.

Ok, I think the trick is to have at least one more in addition to en-US+en (I have a couple more).
This gets very fun once you start using a vpn from another country.
Indeed, and sometimes strange things happen:

ssh tunnel from Australia to server located in California. Geo IP tool [1] reports it's in Fremont, CA. But Google assigns Taiwanese locale..

Outdated/erroneous geolocation database? or did I take a wrong turn somewhere ;-)

[1] http://www.geoiptool.com

This. I travel a lot, I've had this happen too often. Sometimes they even lock payment methods based on where you are, it's horrible.