
Google no longer lets you change domains to search different countries - lnguyen
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16561848/google-search-always-local-results-ignores-domain
======
f_allwein
original source: [https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search-
result...](https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search-results-more-
local-and-relevant/)

One thing Google has traditionally been poor at is supporting people who speak
two or more languages. I'm a German living in London, and I already had a hard
time getting results in German if I wanted them (often, I go to Wikipedia
directly).

Changing my location in Google's settings, as described in the article, did
not make a difference. Adding &hl=## (e.g. &hl=de ) to a search results ULR
still works though.

Not ideal...

~~~
timthelion
This is a real pain point for me as a programmer in Prague. I want all
programming language questions to return English results, because the Czech
language has no stack-exchange ;), but I want all commercial queries to give
Czech results, because I cannot even buy something in the US, even if I wanted
to, they just won't ship here. This doesn't end up working very well
unfortunately, and I don't know how to get the behavior that I want.

~~~
natoliniak
I use one browser with a geographically based proxy and another one straight
trough. Also, commercial VPNs are cheap and pretty reliable these days (the
vendor I use has pops in majority of countries). Just a silly game to play
with the content providers who are isolating users into specific market
regions.

~~~
timthelion
So now I need a VPN to buy cat food online ;) !

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SrslyJosh
Obligatory plug: DuckDuckGo lets you pick any locale you want via a drop-down.

~~~
thelastaelor
DDG maker also has a history of selling users' info to the highest bidder

Obligatory plug: startpage

~~~
pritambaral
Source?

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mejin
What's so bad about this is it I'm using someone else's computer in a
different country I can rarely stay on the English version. For example, in
incognito, even after changing to the English Google, if I go to any other
Google site (ex. trends) not only do I get the local language version, but on
mobile there is no way to change the language.

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nemoniac
As a European who frequently visits other European countries on business, I
can say that Google behaviour has always been painful. I would like to get
search results in a handful of languages of my choice but Google makes it a
struggle.

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Gys
'Google said that it’ll now deliver search results relevant to your current
location no matter which domain you visit.'

Strange, since this morning my searches suddenly show a google.ae domain. That
is something right to left Arabic I think, because I cannot make sense of
it... I live in Portugal BTW and only speak North-European languages...

These kind of things happen sometimes (location and language mixups). It makes
me wonder what kind of profiles Google has on me and probably a lot of other
people. Its more worrying what this kind of major errors possible means to
governmental institutes which are probably keen on small details...

~~~
londons_explore
With default settings, the location of google search is based on IP address
only.

The location is pretty reliable, unless you share your IP address (and the few
hundred addresses either side of yours) with people from another place.

~~~
chewz
It isn’t. I am using VPN server located in Netherlands but the provider is
affiliated in UAE. Guess which Google page I am getting?

~~~
averagewall
Yes. I have to use a VPN for all Google services and it's a complete mess.
Youtube shows me Japanese and some European language ads depending on where my
VPN server happens to be at the time even though everything I actually do on
Youtube and Gmail is in English, and even though I'm logged in. They seem to
have no idea what language their users use. Search is just as bad, so is Bing.

Isn't there an old browser language setting standard that never really got
used? Seems better than a special search setting for Google and another for
every other site.

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drusepth
Title makes it sounds like you're stuck with Google-of-whatever-country-
you're-in. You're not: you just have to select the country you want from
settings instead of typing in its TLD now.

From the article:

>If for some reason you don't see the right country when you're browsing, you
can still go into settings and select the correct country service you want to
receive. Typing the relevant ccTLD in your browser will no longer bring you to
the various country services—this preference should be managed directly in
settings.

~~~
chewz
It is acctually change for good as long as you are staying logged in.

~~~
Sylos
How is it a change for good? Just seems like Google Search is becoming even
clumsier for bilingual people.

Sometimes I want results in my mother-tongue, sometimes I want results in
English. And I expect my search engine to have a way to quickly specify that
without going into the settings each time.

~~~
drusepth
It's definitely a change for good for me. There might have been a way to set
the locale in my settings before I didn't know about, but I've moved to a new
country every month for over a year now and I never want to be redirected to
the local Google (for a bunch of reasons). It's nice that I can just set
American/Google.com apparently now, instead of manually flipping back every
time I use google/maps.

~~~
482794793792894
Alright, but it really doesn't seem to me like fixing this issue for you would
require breaking the search for bilingual people. There's gotta be so many
better ways to resolve that.

~~~
drusepth
Just so I understand the problem, is search now broken for bilingual people
because they sometimes prefer search results in one locale/language and
sometimes prefer other search results in a different one? I also speak Spanish
(and some Dutch), but I can't think of any time I'd actively want to use their
local-Google, even while I lived in the Netherlands.

~~~
482794793792894
As I understand it, English is your mother tongue. If so, that's probably why
you don't have this issue.

For me, French is my mother tongue and I live in France. So, there's lots of
things that I'd want to research that are specific to France (laws, culture,
geography etc.) and then obviously, if you speak French fluidly, you get much
more precise and detailed information for these in French texts.

If you're lucky, the English text is just a bad translation, but more often
than not, the English text assumes that you must be some guy from a foreign
country that really doesn't care about specifics and instead just wants an
overview.

On the other hand, if I need to look up technical information or most
international science, then English is the lingua franca, what gives you the
best results in most cases.

In some cases, I'll even try both languages, just to make sure I'm not missing
any useful information or to gauge which language gives better results (for
example when a globally usable technology happens to be exceptionally popular
in France).

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curt15
"In an email to The Verge, Google clarified that users will see results
removed appropriate for whichever location their search is set to; however, if
the country they’re physically in requires results to be removed no matter
what, then results will get stripped out regardless of which location they
choose."

Are searches originating from other countries undisturbed? Or does the right
to be forgotten also police what non-European citizens can see in their own
countries?

~~~
chewz
So as an European living in Thailand I can search for lectures on Greek
democracy and watch Chaplin’s Dictator on YouTube but a Thai person sitting
right next to me cannot.

That makes the world such a diverse place again.

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Canada
I wish Google would respect your accept language header instead of stupidly
returning results based on IP address.

~~~
greglindahl
Sadly, many users have accept language headers which don't correspond to what
they actually want.

~~~
Canada
It's too bad browsers never made a prominent button to choose language and
instead buried this option deep down.

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ireallydonot
Yes, censoring comes step by step. Haha, with silky excuses as usual

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Overtonwindow
There's always TOR.

