I let you track me Google, please use it for some good UX and not just advertising.
In my case, I live in the United States, but Google is determined to serve me Spanish results even for Catalan-related queries. E.g. preferring the Spanish Wikipedia. The search engine's behavior has had ups and downs over the years, but it has never been great.
This is very much a problem for my children, who don't understand Spanish, as well as for the Catalan-speaking regions of the world that are not in Spain, including Andorra.
In my experience, Gemini easily flags any Catalan content as unsafe and prevents the conversation from continuing. Even for prompts like "summarize this article". This may have improved lately, but still.
Google used to be an example in sensitivity to the world's diversity, being a responsible major player. Way back. Now, although I applaud some efforts multiple teams continue making, it is obvious this is no longer a priority.
I'm curious, what are the keywords that trigger that?
Lately they've decided that auto translating the local language into English in Maps reviews is the wrong thing to do. They translate every other language into English but somehow since I live in this place I must speak the local language too, so I don't need that in English.
Ditto for search results. Surely you want Wikipedia in the local language! I mean you've been there for so long! You search for things in the local language, surely that's a sign of your preference and not the fact that searching for things locally requires use of the local language.
This also applies to so much other "we must make our software so smart and guess all your preferences". Google fails so consistently at this I cannot understand why they persist other than some sort of misplaced corporate self regard.
He told me that for efficiency, they had different stages in the content rendering and that the main page structure didn't have your user information yet. That's rubbish IMHO because the accept language header should be readily available in that phase.
The guy you argued with sounds like they were semi-justifying this with the typical "noogler" rose colored glasses.
That's called premature optimization.
All accounts can be active at the same time on the same phone, there is a dropdown to switch in the Store app, and that works even with a work profile on the side. I've yet to see real downsides, except for course remembering which account is on which country and manually switching.
Google will then go on to complain about users installing APKs from shady sources but this practice pushes users to do so. I'm sure a decent amount of users ended up with malware on their phones just because they wanted to install an app that wasn't available in their listed country.
Using Google search, which luckily did not decide to show me "local" results to an English query like it often does home, I found a support thread suggesting I set my Accept Language to have something other than English as a second language. Lo and behold, the page decided to now respect it.
I think this is because half of Google live their entire career in California, so they don't know about other languages, units, time zones at all.
It's weird, because they employ SO many foreigners, bringing them to California. But somehow upon arrival they all get memory wiped about the existence of anything outside the bay area.
Other companies do this right. Google is user hostile.
No. I will NEVER navigate by bike, foot, or public transport in these strange America-only units.
Which is kinda valid, in the southern and south-western parts this is done because there is a significant Swedish-speaking minority so most cities and streets have names in both languages.
But at the time I lived in central Finland, where the streets DIDN'T have official Swedish names, they just ... translated them. Which was super fun for navigating.
At any one time, there's got to be tens of millions of people accessing Google from a country which has a primary language unknown to the traveller. Even if this number is insignificant compared to Google's full user base, the cost for Google to service 20-30mn people with a feature is presumably lower than their annual ad revenues across 20-30mn people.
It is of course useful for those 700+million, but they are not customers of Google, they users/the product. So long as you won't go elsewhere (in mass) you don't matter.
People like us are an edge case.
Many EU country have more than one official languages.
Most previous colony is bilingual.