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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> My theory has always been that in any given country, there are far more native speakers with misconfigured computing environments than there are visitors and nomadic folks like me.

But then why doesn't Google just make it easier to set that setting? Honestly, when I'm in another country, I don't get too upset that Google results are in another language, I just get upset that I can't seem to find a simple way to change it.

Even then I'm probably giving Google too much of a pass, because they know everything about me. This happens even when I'm logged into Chrome. If they're able to target hyper-personalized ads to me, surely they know I'm an English speaker even when I'm in Mexico.

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Google's answer to this problem is, "Just log in! Then we will always know what language you prefer." So Google doesn't make it easier to change that setting because they want you to be logged in all the time so they can track you better.

I had a fascinating issue with Google.

I am a monolingual English speaker. I visited Iceland, and as happens, Google started serving UIs in Icelandic even while I was logged in.

What was interesting was this continued for weeks after returning to my home country. There was no setting I could find to go back to English; I got good at the specific Icelandic keywords I needed to navigate the UI. Then without any ceremony, things suddenly reverted back to English.

Back in the mid-2000s, I remember there being 3 different language settings in your Google account, the one on the security page completely ignoring whatever language settings you had and always using geo-ip instead. And I couldn’t even figure out why there were 3 different settings for language.

I had a similar experience with (enterprise paid) Outlook365 Webmail (but in Italian, which I do not read). It persisted for several days and then went away before I bothered to chase it down.

Logging in does not completley solve this with google. A number of pages languages are still IP based.

It doesn't always work. When I'm in Spain, with my Google account configured to use English, Youtube search returns videos in Spanish (even though the Youtube interface is displayed in English).

Logging in doesn't solve it.

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