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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but Google's inability to know that I speak english (even though I'm logged in and I've configured various of its services with this information), is mind boggling. Seriously, how does my search-language setting not override my IP?

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I agree. Google doesn't respect the Accept-Language header, just the location. It's really mind-boggling, and that has been the case for ages.

Google sort of respects the header, but my experience has been that the behavior is odd.

I was working on adding localization to a web site, and so changed my headers to prefer Japanese. I accidentally left this on when I visited AdWords. I put English back to the top, but it took a week or so of manually changing the interface back to English for it to stick. Took one time to get it in Japanese, and about 50 to get it back to English.

Perhaps most/many google users do not own their computers?

How annoying would it be for hundreds of internet cafe customers in China or India to search google only to realize it is in English because some foreigner changed the value?

Sure, ip geolocation is a very strong hint about what languge should be used. But being logged in and having set the language should override everything else, and I don't see how a hypothetical shared computer scenario would change that. It's a shame that's not always the case on some Google sites, though you can usually work around it for a while by adding a hl=en URL parameter.

Yes - I log in on about 5 ip locations per day, always logged into google, and it randomly assigns me German versus English.

Is your browser sending the wrong language? http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities

It's sending en-US, but as others have pointed out, server-side user settings should > browser headers and ip address.

In Chrome on Mac, I open Preferences, Under the Hood, Languages and Spell-checker Settings..., drag another language to the top of the list, and Google starts giving me whatever language I put on top.

I'm a native English speaker, so I only do this for testing app i18n support, but it seems straightforward (if cumbersome) to me.

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