Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

82 points by jeanlucas 140 days ago | 87 comments

Google Search change in a way that I can’t seem to opt out of.

I’m based in a non-English-speaking country, but I regularly search in English, especially for technical topics.

My Google account, my laptop, my phone, my interface language, and preferences are all set to English; only my physical location and payment methods are local.

What happens is that Google increasingly returns localized results in my native language and aggressively applies automatic translation.

Some concrete behaviors I’m seeing:

- Queries written in English still prioritize pages in Portuguese, even when equivalent English sources exist.

- Reddit results are often force-translated instead of linking to the original English content.

- “AI mode” responses are always in Portuguese, even when the prompt is clearly in English, with no visible way to force output language.

- The UI offers a choice between “Portuguese” and “All web,” but selecting “All web” doesn’t reliably return English results nor disable translation.

- In practice, explicit query language seems to be overridden by inferred user preferences (location / account language).

I’m curious whether others are seeing the same behavior, and whether there’s any way to restore search to become 100% useful again; or what are you using since this really limits search results, especially for technical things.

tambourine_man 140 days ago |

Google is institutionally incapable of understanding that some people can speak multiple languages. Only reliable solution I found is to create one account for each language and restrict the number of available languages to just that one in:

https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1

YouTube is the worst offender these days. I get Portuguese videos auto-dubbed to English and vice-versa even though I can understand both and with no way to disable other than account switching.

It also can't tell Portuguese from Spanish in search queries.

out_of_protocol 140 days ago | |

You also need a VPN, otherwise you'll get results in local language anyway

orloffm 140 days ago | |

You can now select languages to not auto-translate in YouTube settings.

jhart99 140 days ago | | |

I didn't realize they finally added a way to sort of control this behavior. It's under Languages in the YouTube settings. Similarly there is a control for captions languages under Captions/Subtitles.

pentagrama 140 days ago | |

To avoid YouTube auto-dubbing I use https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/

Recommended!

franciscop 140 days ago |

I have the same problem and my "solution" is mediocre, but kind of works: use a VPN. I used to set it to the UK, but since the recent developments I've been experimenting with other English-speaking countries. My native language is Spanish, but I live in Japan, and it's odd because I never want Japanese (language) results, but I am fine with Spanish results.

Some times I need to switch to Spain, or Japan, or just disable it due to geo blocking. I use Mullvad, which makes this easier, but TBH the main practical use of my VPN is what you mention, I never want results in Japanese and Google is very bad at getting the hint.

The worst one I keep noticing is MDN, I know there's an article in perfectly fine English but why am I always redirected to the local language one? That's not even location-dependent.

jeanlucas 140 days ago | |

Japan is an entire situation to me as well, Google completely walls off results in Japanese, even when I specifically want it. Sometimes I need to search things in English, but on the Japanese web and for that I think VPN might be the only way.

I run a small personal VPN, but not one of these company solutions, might be time to do that.

estebarb 140 days ago |

Not only search: titles and description of Youtube videos are being translated. Colab UI is now in Spanish (using technical terms that make no sense).

Some people may want translation, mostly people that only speak a single language. But for most bilingual people, being forced a translation (a lower quality one), is a worse experience. I'm surprised that no one at Google has pushed back this anti-user behavior. It is like no one at Google knows more than one language.

The worst part is when traveling. Google ignores the browser settings, so it throws me Japanese or German website, even if my browser settings clearly says English then Spanish.

petre 140 days ago | |

> The worst part is when traveling.

They are trying so hard to be smart that the Chrome locale is determined from your GPS location, which creates obvious problems. I tried to change it once using the Sensors in dev tools in order to get rid of the AM/PM in time input fields, to no avail. You do not simply get the 24h time format.

jjaksic 140 days ago | |

FWIW, I once complained about this and they told me it's a "hard problem".

shadowgovt 140 days ago |

Google has a lot of data to see how the average user uses computers. The problem is, that data tells them that the number of people who misconfigure their localization settings (or can't configure them; shared computer) is way larger than the people using those settings on purpose to try and request non-local results. So they err far, far on the side of using your location as a signal of intent over your machine and browser configuration.

ETA: https://www.google.com/advanced_search appears to give options for tuning your language and region in the search results. I haven't used it personally in ages, but it may give you what you're looking for.

jeanlucas 140 days ago | |

Your comment makes sense to me and it feels like a Windows trade-off: optimizing for the average user while eroding power-user controls; Mark Russinovich has talked about the need for explicit, advanced modes instead of burying power-user behavior behind heuristics in one of his videos about what he would change in Windows.

Google could benefit from the same idea: an expert mode where explicit signals override inference with genuinely usable advanced search features (language, filters, etc) as first-class tools.

antiloper 140 days ago |

If you don't want to pay for Kagi: https://duckduckgo.com/

Imustaskforhelp 140 days ago | |

Let me add a few more search providers

brave search ecosia (environment focused) qwant mojeek (a little bit obscure) swisscows (once again obscure)

There is also searx and searxng and their public instances which actually are a mix of many of the search providers I listed about.

Giving references to anyone whose interested perhaps but duckduckgo is a good option to start out and its something that I myself use.

hulitu 140 days ago | |

> If you don't want to pay for Kagi: https://duckduckgo.com/

It is the same shit. Dear duckduckgo, when I ask for results in English (or in other language), I mean it.

It looks like those days Google and duckduckgo are also hallucinating. You aske some terms, in a specific order, and get something which has no relation, whatsoever, with the search query.

coffeefirst 140 days ago |

I have the opposite problem with YouTube, where they insist on dubbing everything when in just want subtitles.

The result is an Italian cooking demo where the chef exclaims “MULTA BENE!” and the AI voice deadpans “it is very good.”

I’m sure it’s even more annoying when you’re bilingual and can’t turn it off.

jeanlucas 140 days ago | |

>I’m sure it’s even more annoying when you’re bilingual and can’t turn it off.

At least on this point now it is possible to turn it off.

coffeefirst 140 days ago | | |

Did they add a global setting somewhere? When I encountered it you had to change it on each video.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 140 days ago |

>Reddit results are often force-translated instead of linking to the original English content.

It's very annoying. Put this in a search query to filter them out: -inurl:?tl=

theodric 140 days ago | |

I built a Firefox extension to inject this sort of thing automatically, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to shill it here. It's not like I'm getting paid for it...

Imustaskforhelp 140 days ago | | |

hey! Quick suggestion but if you create an firefox extension, please open source it. It immensely boosts my trust in an extension and I doubt that it would be considered a shill (atleast in my book) if you open source it and I don't think that you earn from the extension but if its open source and people like it, it opens up a pathway where people can donate if this extension helps their problems!

Qem 140 days ago |

Same problem. My workaround is to use Yandex instead. In my experience it's consistently returning more relevant results than Google for some time already, and there's less censorship while searching torrent related content.

linhns 139 days ago | |

Yandex is utter shit. I’m annoyed by Google giving localized results first but at least they are results, Yandex churns out nothingburgers

Imustaskforhelp 140 days ago |

Please look into duckduckgo or other search providers if possible / if you can and your workflow allows it

Other people might have given more credible information about how to fix it but I am on duckduckgo for 2 years now and I seriously love it and It doesn't have any of these issues.

If your workflow allows so, definitely give duckduckgo (Or other private search engines like brave,startpage,ecosia etc.) a try as well.

DetectDefect 140 days ago | |

Duckduckgo is hosted on Microsoft-owned servers, how could that possibly be considered "private" by any stretch of imagination?

thiht 140 days ago |

Almighty Google knows better, you don’t want English, you just don’t know it yourself!

No seriously, I’m sure 2026 is the year the finest engineers in the world finally learn about Accept-Language and the fact that physical location != spoken language.

necovek 140 days ago | |

They know about it, but decided to ignore it "because most people don't set it correctly".

Instead of trying to figure out who has set it correctly first, and then use it if they have, they always default to language and search results for your location.

I can get the location bit: they want/need to show you local ads, so they push local shops to you too (and just maybe, you do want stuff nearby), but language?

necovek 140 days ago |

Generally, I find the country domains behave consistently: I imagine google.co.uk might still give you English as the main language.

But really, Google has been defaulting to a language based on GeoIP data for a long time now.

googlebot6178 140 days ago | |

They got rid of country specific sites like google.co.uk as said they could work out what people wanted with one size fits all .com Now as an expat when trying to do Christmas shopping for family in UK from abroad using UK shopping results you no longer can. If you ask Gemini who came up with such an idea it will shut you down for questioning Google policies. They are taking the apple approach of telling the user what they need and force them to take or leave it. So I left using Google.

jeanlucas 140 days ago | |

It doesn't really work when we're dealing with content like reddit and the new "AI mode"

morkalork 140 days ago | |

google.ca in Canada is a little schizophrenic in Québec if you are anglo. Especially when you are switching back and forth. Try an English query first, don't find good results, try French and get the same damn English reddit posts but translated into French? What?

denysvitali 140 days ago |

?hl=en

tambourine_man 140 days ago | |

I wish it was that simple.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46413797

jeanlucas 140 days ago | |

sigh

worked, I will bookmark this for now, hope it keeps working. Thanks.

denysvitali 140 days ago | | |

It should work across all Google products

theodric 140 days ago |

I noticed that Reddit behavior recently, but not the other things. I searched for "<productname> Nederland" hoping to find a Dutch source for something I can't get in Ireland, and got a Reddit hit in Dutch that talked about paying €30 for it online with a response talking (also in Dutch) about the thing being $14 at Wal-Mart and Kroger-- neither of which exists in NL. I then noticed the text at the top of the page saying that the post had been auto-translated from English, at which point I got rather annoyed. That €30 in the translated post was $30 in the original: that's not localization at all, rather fabrication. Fucking infuriating.

My theory was that Reddit was shotgunning LLM-translated versions of posts at Google in a bunch of languages to increase hit rate. Maybe Google's really at fault.

Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to find anything on Google thanks to all the transparent autoensloppification of everything, everywhere.

sippeangelo 140 days ago | |

To be clear, this is Reddit auto-translating and poisoning their own search results, and it's the most frustrating thing. Post AI and post Google enshittification, we all ended up appending "reddit" to the end of our searches to filter out all the blogspam and get some real human opinions on queries, so Reddit decides to cash in and make sure they receive the maximum amount of that traffic by making it available in every language under the sun, poisoning their own well deliberately. It's shit turtles all the way down!

toomuchtodo 140 days ago |

Try https://kagi.com/

iamdamian 140 days ago | |

This is the way. In 2025, I don't think you can expect quality when the incentives aren't aligned (in this case, that you are a customer).

jeanlucas 140 days ago | |

I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m curious enough to try it now. Thanks.

drnick1 140 days ago | |

I would never pay for search. The obvious solution here to browse behind Tor or a VPN, or to physically move to an English speaking country if you want to live in a 100% English environment.

bigstrat2003 140 days ago | | |

The obvious solution here is actually to pay for search. Then the company actually cares about keeping you happy, because you are their source of revenue.

necovek 140 days ago | | |

Whatever you do, you are paying for the search in some manner.

With DuckDuckGo, you are being served non-targeted ads. If you go through the trouble of setting anything up to avoid some of the public search engine pitfalls, you are paying with time and effort, and maybe even subscriptions on top like VPN and similar.

Obviously, ad networks want people to have this mindset, and while I have no issue with "stick it to them", it's always going to be an uphill battle.

I actually believe we need distributed and federated p2p search engine built, but trusting the results is hard with that: perhaps this is where blockchain approach (to store hashes of indexed pages?) could bring real value?

jeanlucas 140 days ago | | |

Of those options, paying for search seems like the cheapest.

A VPN might win on price (sometimes? kagi is just $5/mo), but relocating countries to get better results when searching for code related stuff feels a bit over-optimized. And as we know, premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Diti 140 days ago | | |

> I would never pay for search.

I’m curious, why not? The amount of time and frustration saved seems insane, which seems to be a net positive, unless you can’t afford it of course (which is a good argument, but I’m not seeing any in your comment).

Marsymars 140 days ago |

A good part of this is locale-based and not language-based - I find that Google will prefer often local (English) results over the canonical English results that I'm actually looking for.

Though I primarily use Kagi now.

e.g. If I search "world's best pizza" the top Google result is a random local pizza joint that isn't even top-5 in my medium-sized city (but who have included "worldsgreatestpizza" in their long URL), and then a bunch of Facebook results. Kagi's top couple results are sites with rankings of (ostensibly) the world's top pizza restaurants.

hahn-kev 140 days ago |

Yeah I get this a lot, it's really annoying. You can go into settings on Google search and change it to the specific language and culture you want. However it does reset on it's own from time to time.

eevmanu 140 days ago |

  cr=country<two letter>

I have a "kind" of similar need and use *cr* query param based on *ISO 3166-1 alpha-2* [1] to force official language when i want to narrow the search on a specific country (as example when I want to search for english, I use *cr=countryUS*)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

p.s.: YMMV, sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, most of the time works but there is no determinism

pier25 140 days ago |

It’s super frustrating.

It used to be the case that if your query was in one language you’d get results in that language but not anymore. I regularly get a mix of multiple languages and even translated stuff. I've even seen multiple AI blocks in the same results page in two different languages.

It's a mess. I don't think anyone at Google knows what's going on anymore.

numpad0 140 days ago |

Oh it's a lot worse than that. Google Search is localized at scales of about Starlink cell size. You get completely diffrent results by just using a device that are known to live 10 miles from where you'd be.

I know it because there lots of information that don't show on my devices but does on many others away from me. It's annoying to say the very least.

renegat0x0 140 days ago |

searxng allows me to use various locations

https://searx.space/

FrankSansC 140 days ago |

I've got the exact same issue : everything set in English but Google still show me results in French. Even going into advanced search and forcing it to show only results in English doesn't work... And I'm not even talking about the crappy results. 2026 is going to be the year I'm leaving Google for good.

llamaboy 140 days ago |

It’s a pain in the ass when you travel a lot…

jeanlucas 140 days ago | |

Or when you're working with a company in a different country...

drnick1 140 days ago | |

Set up a VPN to your own home/office.

SyrupThinker 140 days ago | | |

FWIW the decision-makers at Google (and some other companies) should just learn what the Accept-Language header is for.

burnt-resistor 140 days ago | | |

WireGuard, especially if home ISP has a public IPv4 that serves ports. (Don't outsource control and access to TailScale.)

guntis_dev 140 days ago |

Google search quality has declined significantly over the years. For many of my searches now, I can ask an LLM and get better results faster - especially for technical questions where I just need a direct answer.

Though I suspect this won't last once LLMs start inserting ads and promoted content into responses.

Imustaskforhelp 140 days ago | |

I imagined truman show / scenes from truman show where they show ads from your last line.

Spoiler alert if you haven't watched truman

But That is incredibly uncanny and I think this is the reason why, I think truman must have caught what's happening and also I saw this youtube video trying to explain that truman knew about the show the whole time and the scene and the time he was digging dirt in the first scenes of the movie, he was actually digging his escape route.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mCXYfv-URg

_august 140 days ago |

I'm currently in based in Medellin, Colombia. This happens to me about 10% of the time, randomly, where the results will be in Spanish. What's more annoying is that my currency selection doesn't persist, and always snaps back to COP when I'm searching flights, etc.

sawmurai 140 days ago |

I had to set the language of my google account to English to make it finally stop auto translating YouTube. Setting the language in YouTube had worked for a few weeks, then it would be reset again. Setting the language of the google account itself appears to have fixed it for good.

kmfrk 140 days ago |

YouTube does this too when I'm on a VPN through a different country, and it doesn't seem to have a lang: operator to steer it in the right direction.

I'd ironically like more results in certain languages - just not language of the VPN location.

Drives me nuts.

cromka 140 days ago |

Forcing AI down our throats. Not only Google search, same thing with YT. Make no mistake, there's enough bilingual people employed by Google across US for them to know perfectly well how annoying this is.

This isn't a coincidence. I'd bet this is so they can inflate their adoption numbers to justify further involvement in the AI race to their shareholders.

Which, to me, is a very string sign that we're in a massive "solution looking for a problem" bubble. We've been there before. We know how it ends.

hulitu 140 days ago |

> Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results

Not only Google. Duckduckgo does the same.

breppp 140 days ago |

did you try using https://www.google.com/ncr ? that used to work

also https://www.google.com/?hl=en might be effective

benhurmarcel 140 days ago |

In my experience it’s been the case for years. I’ve been paying for Kagi instead to solve this.

esseph 140 days ago |

Disabled Google search page location permissions.

Should fix your localized results problem.

burnt-resistor 140 days ago | |

That's not how it works at all. It uses geo IP guessing that override user preferences, that's the whole point.

esseph 140 days ago | | |

Ehhhhh....

If I don't allow Google to know where I am, I don't get location based responses. This is extremely easy to test in incognito mode.

If I enable it I instantly get things specific to the area I live in.

dendark 140 days ago |

It happens to me all the time too, it's fucking annoying as fucking fuck, it doesn't seem to be a solution

derriz 140 days ago | |

Drives me crazy as I travel a lot. Even if I‘m logged into Google and it’s been tracking me for years and it‘s still targeting me with obviously personalized ads but it will assume I’ve suddenly acquired temporary proficiency in French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc stubbornly ignoring the language I’ve used for my query or the only language I’ve ever - in all my interactions with Google over years - ever used. What the fuck would be so hard to just NOT use braindead geolocation (which doesn’t even work in countries like Switzerland) when you know for certain who I am. You track all this information about me and use it to generate ad revenue but refuse to use my language preference?

Kwpolska 140 days ago |

Google stopped caring about a good user experience a long time ago, shareholders want more AI slop, not regular searches. I've changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, it's much saner overall (although I sometimes need to fall back to Google with !g for extremely niche topics).

shadowgovt 140 days ago | |

The problem is that technical users aren't Google's target audience.

burnt-resistor 140 days ago |

Workaround: a VPN.

drnick1 140 days ago |

> My Google account, my laptop, my phone, my interface language, and preferences are all set to English; only my physical location and payment methods are local.

Your problem start here. Don't give Google your phone number, location, or payment information. Google is a monstrous surveillance machine. If you can't do without Google search for some reason, at least use a VPN or Tor.