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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, google might do it technically smart.

But the user experience is extra poor, because they do not honor the Accept-Language header, but insist to use the local language of your public IP address. When travelling that can often be a language you don't understand. And when travelling you often get an extra security step, because they haven't seen you in that country before. Extra painful in a language you don't understand.

Disclaimer: I use Cookie Autodelete and Firefox containers. So they get a bit less info about me than about the average user. But ignoring Accept-Language makes no sense to me. Pretty unlikely the user does not understand the language of the browser but the local language of the IP address.

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It's extremely common that Accept-Language headers are wrong because people don't know how to configure their OS or browser with the right language preferences, e.g. they add their language preference second or not at all.

Sounds weird to me. 99% of the users probably don't configure anything. (So do I, because I don't see the need. My preferred language is the language of my operating system. Otherwise I would change it in the operating system.) By default the browser should send Accept-Language the same as the localization in use. It doesn't sound likely that people would use the browser in a language they don't understand.

Google is the developer of the most popular web browser. If this is really a common problem, they can make UI changes to their browser to make that more accessible. It is not so hard to imagine a way to do it for even the most casual users, e.g. maybe using something similar to the Google Translate headers I notice when I use Chrome.

Besides, I have difficulty believing that this is a common problem. I have never seen a user whose OS was configured to a wrong language. Even if they have zero computer knowledge, they just ask someone else to fix it as the first thing. Computers/smartphones are already scary for technophobes; they wouldn't even touch them when they are in a language they don't understand.

This is especially irritating for VPN users as it is not just a problem when traveling, but all the time. I essentially gave up on hoping to get Google pages in a language that I understand. However, they made the situation worse in the past year: even if I use my country's localized Google domain, Google ignores that and gives me results according to my IP: websites from a different country about a possibly irrelevant subject, in a language I don't understand.

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