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.
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.
Recommended!
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.
I run a small personal VPN, but not one of these company solutions, might be time to do that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least on this point now it is possible to turn it off.
It's very annoying. Put this in a search query to filter them out: -inurl:?tl=