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Google is^H^Hwas* really bloody annoying when it comes to this. English (en-us and en) is the only language in my accept header. When I lived in Geneva though,

Google is^H^Hwas* really bloody annoying when it comes to this. English (en-us and en) is the only language in my accept header. When I lived in Geneva though, Google always used to serve me pages in German (presumably Swiss-German). Gee, that's logical. (Geneva is a mainly French speaking city, though over 40% of the population is non-Swiss.) Where I live now is another French speaking area. I just checked and it seems they are no longer serving French pages to me. But they were even just one year ago. (I don't use Google by default, so I don't know when they changed.) Admittedly, that was an issue with geo-detecting rather than the website having bad language detection. * They seemed to have stopped. Air France is (though they have many faults) actually alright at detecting my language. And mostly gives me English pages...

mschuster91 13y ago
IIRC google also "detects" language based on DNS geolocation, i.e. doing a dig google.com may reveal different IP addresses in every country (depending on the language). There are some IP addresses which, when viewed "raw" like http://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/ http://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/ will return a localized Google.
bhrgunatha 13y ago
I always have to open google.com/ncr in a separate tab which sets a session cookie (I don't accept permanent cookies from google.) I guess they've changed their logic for some places, just not where I am :(
mrweasel 13y ago
Google has become worse when it comes to language detection. I often get Brazilian Portuguese on Google Analytics, I'm in Denmark. I believe one of by co-worker often got Russian.
tazjin 13y ago
My accept-language header only has en_GB and en in it. Google still randomly serves me pages in Swedish and German (which are both languages I speak, but which I both explicitly disabled in my Google account settings). The best case of this was when they launched the preview for the new Google Maps version - there was a landing page with some information and a button in the middle. This page was served to me in three languages at the same time (the header, the button and the info text) - presumably served by different internal components that all handle languages differently.
ronaldx 13y ago
Worse: Google went through a period of normally serving me French-language pages. I'm not in a French-speaking country. I don't have French in my accept header. I never expressed any preference towards the French language. But, my ISP was Orange (France Telecom) and I had a variable IP from them.

mschuster91 13y ago

IIRC google also "detects" language based on DNS geolocation, i.e. doing a dig google.com may reveal different IP addresses in every country (depending on the language). There are some IP addresses which, when viewed "raw" like http://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/ http://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd/ will return a localized Google.

bhrgunatha 13y ago

I always have to open google.com/ncr in a separate tab which sets a session cookie (I don't accept permanent cookies from google.) I guess they've changed their logic for some places, just not where I am :(

mrweasel 13y ago

Google has become worse when it comes to language detection. I often get Brazilian Portuguese on Google Analytics, I'm in Denmark. I believe one of by co-worker often got Russian.

tazjin 13y ago

My accept-language header only has en_GB and en in it. Google still randomly serves me pages in Swedish and German (which are both languages I speak, but which I both explicitly disabled in my Google account settings). The best case of this was when they launched the preview for the new Google Maps version - there was a landing page with some information and a button in the middle. This page was served to me in three languages at the same time (the header, the button and the info text) - presumably served by different internal components that all handle languages differently.

ronaldx 13y ago

Worse: Google went through a period of normally serving me French-language pages. I'm not in a French-speaking country. I don't have French in my accept header. I never expressed any preference towards the French language. But, my ISP was Orange (France Telecom) and I had a variable IP from them.