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Google no longer lets you change domains to search different countries
- f_allwein 9y agooriginal source: https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search-results-more-local-and-relevant/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search-result... 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 9y agoThis 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 9y agoI 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 9y agoSo now I need a VPN to buy cat food online ;) !
- drusepth 9y agoThat sucks. One workaround you could use would be to have one browser profile for American searches and one for Czech searches, and flip between the two, even though it's a solution to make things suck just a little bit less.
- TomMarius 9y agoI am in Czechia as well and I never had this problem. Searching in English gives me relevant results (about the same as if I was in the USA) and searching in Czech gives me Czech results. Shopping works OK even with English searches - I'd get English speaking Czech shops or German/UK Ebay and Amazon. I have all computer/browser locales set to US English, Google uses that but I remain on the .cz site. Works flawlessly.
- SrslyJosh 9y agoObligatory plug: DuckDuckGo lets you pick any locale you want via a drop-down.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 9y agoDDG has been my daily driver for years now. Except for very occasional very esoteric programming questions, I see no reason to switch back.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoI’m shocked at how good DuckDuckGo is these days. I switched my desktop and laptop to it months ago. Maps on it are still awful, so for the moment my cell is using Google.
- 482794793792894 9y agoYeah, it definitely feels like Google has gotten into this phase of a monopoly where you just stop trying. It was specifically Google that used to have all kinds of advanced user thingamabobs, now they actively make it harder on advanced users.
- thelastaelor 9y agoDDG maker also has a history of selling users' info to the highest bidder Obligatory plug: startpage
- pritambaral 9y agoSource?
- Gys 9y ago'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...
- nicwilson 9y agoThat'd be the United Arab Emirates.
- londons_explore 9y agoWith 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 9y agoIt 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 9y agoYes. 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Overtonwindow 9y agoThere's always TOR.
- curt15 9y ago"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 9y agoSo 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.
- nemoniac 9y agoAs 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.
- drusepth 9y agoTitle 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 9y agoIt is acctually change for good as long as you are staying logged in.
- Sylos 9y agoHow 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 9y agoIt'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 9y agoAlright, 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.
- Canada 9y agoI wish Google would respect your accept language header instead of stupidly returning results based on IP address.
- greglindahl 9y agoSadly, many users have accept language headers which don't correspond to what they actually want.
- Canada 9y agoIt's too bad browsers never made a prominent button to choose language and instead buried this option deep down.
- mejin 9y agoWhat'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.
- ireallydonot 9y agoYes, censoring comes step by step. Haha, with silky excuses as usual