[masklinn]

> 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

[tonfa]

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.

[_delirium]

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.

[tonfa]

Ok, I think the trick is to have at least one more in addition to en-US+en (I have a couple more).

[nolok]

This gets very fun once you start using a vpn from another country.

[woodson]

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Outdated/erroneous geolocation database?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