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Comment by mubou | Hacker News Reader

> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country

It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.

Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?

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In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".

I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.

Kagi has the opposite problem though, there's no way to search for results only in a specific language.

99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.

One thing Google does which I like is that I don't have to fiddle with region dropdowns. I just drop in a keyword in my local language and it knows to switch the results sources.

Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.

that sounds good until you want to buy that uniquely named ingredient in the usa and it will only give results elsewhere and you have little control

I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!

Use https://google.com/ncr (which stands for "no country redirect" IIRC). Has been working for me in a non-English speaking country for a very long time.

The best incantation I've got to force English Google results is https://www.google.com/search?q=hedgehog&lr=lang_en&hl=en&ud...

For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.

Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.

If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.

This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)

Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.

Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.

You can use https://google.com/ncr which doesn't redirect to a country.

duck duck go have a drop down where you select any county anywhere you are.

want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.

try searching for an english word in incognito, there should be a yellow box on the right that lets you change to english. dunno about logged in searches

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