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Where google has lost me is on country detection. It's virtually impossible to change country context. NCR feature disappeared, and even choosing a specific la

by hrktb 10y ago

Where google has lost me is on country detection. It's virtually impossible to change country context. NCR feature disappeared, and even choosing a specific language for the search results won't prevent some results from one's country to bubble up at the top (i.e. if I am in France, setting the interface in english and asking results for 'any region' will still boost french results) It's just huge PITA to search for resources in a global context, which is the majority of my searches. DDG is a lot more sensible and manageable in this respect.

bhrgunatha 10y ago
Websites that choose display language based on IP address is the bane of my existence and google is the absolute worst site for doing this. I used to use ncr constantly for any google related task. I don't trust google enough any more to log in and set language preferences - I only allow their web properties to store session cookies when needed. The best I can do with google is to write a dumb greasemonkey script to add 'hl=en' to any google URLs.
- cisstrd 10y ago
  Oh nice, I agree... normally I don't have the problem since I pretty much constantly use VPN-Servers in english-speaking locations, but whenever I don't or are on another machine it's somewhat "weird" and frustrating. Valid criticism. So I guess from their part it's a feature, user-friendliness, they have to serve the layman and the professional. If one uses a Google Account, you probably can tweak this with some settings?
probably_wrong 10y ago
> NCR feature disappeared Have you tried using it again? I kept forgetting that it was gone, until one day it started working again.
- hrktb 10y ago
  There was this old thread with an alternative way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791018 I tried both but it seems still dead (or t's because I'm on mobile ?). To be honest I don't think it will either come back. There is such a long trend of getting rid of generic searches that it seems that Google has a very natural incentive to do so. I wouldn't be surprised that providing non localized search results has a very high cost (be it in performance, ad results or any other metric) on Google's side. It must feel logical in their position to reduce that cost to a minimum.

by hrktb 10y ago

bhrgunatha 10y ago

Websites that choose display language based on IP address is the bane of my existence and google is the absolute worst site for doing this. I used to use ncr constantly for any google related task. I don't trust google enough any more to log in and set language preferences - I only allow their web properties to store session cookies when needed. The best I can do with google is to write a dumb greasemonkey script to add 'hl=en' to any google URLs.

cisstrd 10y ago
Oh nice, I agree... normally I don't have the problem since I pretty much constantly use VPN-Servers in english-speaking locations, but whenever I don't or are on another machine it's somewhat "weird" and frustrating. Valid criticism. So I guess from their part it's a feature, user-friendliness, they have to serve the layman and the professional. If one uses a Google Account, you probably can tweak this with some settings?

probably_wrong 10y ago

> NCR feature disappeared Have you tried using it again? I kept forgetting that it was gone, until one day it started working again.

hrktb 10y ago
There was this old thread with an alternative way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791018 I tried both but it seems still dead (or t's because I'm on mobile ?). To be honest I don't think it will either come back. There is such a long trend of getting rid of generic searches that it seems that Google has a very natural incentive to do so. I wouldn't be surprised that providing non localized search results has a very high cost (be it in performance, ad results or any other metric) on Google's side. It must feel logical in their position to reduce that cost to a minimum.