It doesn't improve my life, at all.

When I have questions about a concept and I use the english word for it (because I never learned CS in French and would not understand the French page), the first Wikipedia page will still be in French, because of those shitty tags. Honestly, those are only useful if the words are the same in multiple languages.

As for me, this recent changes get on my nerves, and are one reason why I'm not using Google anymore.

Is it because of those tags? Or is it just because Google on its own has done a comprehensive job of indexing and incorrectly thought you wanted the French version?

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN.

I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results.

Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior.

Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using right now is the one I want to use instead of the first one I logged in many days ago.

You don’t even need to travel - I’ve seen Google decide at different times that I should be getting Polish, French, or Portuguese, instead of English from my desktop in London.

I mean look I have to sympathise with Google here. They've no doubt had the entire combined wisdom of Google looking at this problem and clearly there is just no way for human beings to comprehend what the `Accept-Language` header does.

/s because, you know.

It's absurd how they keep finding new ways to make this worse. They have ignored `Accept-Language: en` for a long time but used to at least have a link to switch to the english version. Then that link stopped appearing on search result pages and now it doesn't even consistently show up on the home page. Now it seems they don't even fully respect the account language wile logged in. WTF.

While on vacation google decided to switch me to chinese even though I was logged in with an account that was set to english for decades on a browser that didn't change. The only way to change that back is to go to your account settings, and all the links leading there are ... in chinese. Even once back home this language change persisted. At no point did Google ever get an `Accept-Language: zh*` from me or any other indication that I wanted to switch languages besides the IP I'm connecting from which means fuck all.

My guess is it's a mixture of malice (I know this person said it doesn't want X, but maybe we can sell them X in this particular situation, so just go for it anyways) and pure simple incompetence and lack of communication in a large enough org

> pure simple incompetence

Hanlon's razor strikes again.

The other day someone here (ostensibly a site for tech people) argued that the `Accept` header is useless, we can all just put random query string parameters or extensions in the URL to tell the server what content type we expect back, so I wouldn't be surprised if Google developers simply fail to see the point of the Accept-Language header.

Maybe if we ever reach AGI I can ask it kindly to respect my checkboxes.

Except, in non English speaking counties, the vast majority of people do not change the Accept-Language header (through various browser/OS mechanisms), and receive default results. But then experiments show that they are more likely to interact with pages when shown in the languages Google thinks you actually use.

If you go to myaccount.google.com/language , you can remove languages you don't actually speak, or turn off automatically adding languages altogether. It doesn't always work for everything, but it's a good signal.

I agree there should be a way to force this better, but there's a bunch of work being done on it.

You can add a hl=en parameter to the URL, and most Google apps will respect it.

I've heard this excuse before, and I don't buy it.

I live in a non-English speaking country.

The vast majority of people use their device in the local language, and for any browser to see the OS is set to - let's say, Thai - and then just proceed to send accept-language: en is just absurd.

The other possibility is that these people who can not understand English, somehow manage to use a device set to English language on a daily basis. Also, absurd.

Unfortunately, thats just not true. Accept-Lanuage is set to English most of the time, even for people in non-enlish speaking counties. It's not that they cannot use English, it's that experiments show that users are more likely to interact with content that is in their predicted language, even when Accept-Language is set to English.

> Accept-Lanuage is set to English most of the time, even for people in non-enlish speaking counties.

Unless you can point to some kind of evidence that shows Accept-Language is set to English regardless of the host OS' language/region setting, there's zero reason to believe this claim.

> It's not that they cannot use English

Right, the entirety of non-english speaking, internet-using humans are able to read English, it's just a bunch of them choose not to, but only when it comes to using a webpage? Is that what you're suggesting?

Edit:

I just did some very quick testing of the theory that browsers will send the "wrong" Accept-Language header.

* Safari on macOS with preferred OS language set to English (Australian) sends `en-AU,en;q=0.9`

* Safari on macOS with preferred OS language set to Thai (and second pref of English) sends `th-TH,th;q=0.9`

* Chrome on macOS with preferred OS language set to English (Australian) for some reason sends `en-GB,en-US;q=0.9,en;q=0.8`

* Chrome on macOS with preferred OS language set to Thai (and second pref of English) sends `th-TH,th;q=0.9`

* Edge on Windows 11 with preferred OS language set to Thai (and second pref of English) sends `th,en;q=0.9,en-GB;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.7`

* Chrome on Windows 11 with preferred OS language set to Thai (and second pref of English) sends `th-TH,th;q=0.9`

Firefox is the one that can get it wrong, sometimes: in the macOS VM, I had already downloaded Firefox before setting the OS language to Thai, and the downloaded versions set a browser preferred language which doesn't change based on the OS language (the default is US English).

But when I downloaded Firefox using Edge in the Win11 VM, the language was already set to Thai, so I got a "Thai preferred" download link when I typed "Firefox" in the search bar, and thus the language string it sends is not surprising: `th,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3`

So, again: without some evidence to show that somehow people who have no understanding of English, are using their computers or phones or tablets in English, I'm calling bullshit on this repeated claim that "non english user's browsers send requests for English language content".

Let me clarify what I'm claiming here.

In many counties, users have their OS/Browser settings set to English only, when they actually also speak other languages (or in certain countries, exclusively other languages). There's also a bunch of complexity in regards to spoken/written language comprehension, but I won't get into that here.

There is much more engagement when Google presents content in languages people actually know (or, rather, languages Google thinks they know), regardless of what their Accept-Language header is.

Unfortunately, I cannot present you with hard stats, as I no longer work there. I'm sorry that's unsatisfactory, and I'm not asking you to blindly trust the word of a stranger. Just wanted to offer up some insight into why the system behaves as it does sometimes.

I've seen quite a few people with my own eyes use devices with an English interface (or French) without knowing much English (or French). Some of them are illiterate. This is quite common in some parts of the world. These people find use in their English devices, because websites like YouTube provide content in their language even when the interface is not in their language.

Sometimes these people cannot switch the interface language of the operating system. For example٫ Windows Single Language edition forbids changing the language of the interface, and it is common in developing countries.

Hmm my google chrome seems to correctly handle everything in English. It must be a combination of setting my machine locale to English and probably on my Google account as well, no need for vpns.

You can add a "hl=en" parameter to the URL, and most Google sites should respect it.

The “skeleton” of the site usually does, but not the content it pulls. Search results and suggestions are notorious offenders.

> There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN.

There are browser settings you can force or failing that, an extension.

What about http://google.com/ncr for No Country Redirect?

Yeah, those were the days, but that doesn't work anymore. I see plenty of Portuguese results in google.com, even though I have only English as “Preferred Language” and “Automatically add languages: Off” in https://myaccount.google.com/language

Same with all the other rants above. Turning off autoplay in Youtube has become a weekly tradition here, like watering the cactus.

Ha, I once had the exact opposite problem. I studied part of my CS degree in France, in French, but for some reason when I went to sit the exam, they thought I would like to have the exam in English. I freaked out - I didn't know any of the terms in English, only in French. Fortunately they had a spare copy in French for me to work from.