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Comment by aristidb | Hacker News Reader

Actually, this problem also exists for native speakers in their own countries. I'm a German in Germany, yet when I'm searching for technical terms, in the overwhelming majority I want English results because they are better. (The German results are often just blog posts regurgitating what somebody else wrote in English.)

It used to be that I could use www.google.de for German searches, and www.google.com/ncr for English searches, but that does not (reliably) work anymore. I now grudgingly type www.google.com/?hl=en in the address bar more often than not.

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Exactly. When it comes to the world of programming and IT, English is the lingua franca. I'm French but spend 99% of my time on the English-speaking web. The French edition of Google is only good at pissing me off.

On Google Search: Options -> Search settings -> Languages

There you can change the language(s) of your search result. I think you can mark up to 10 languages.

Except it still gives me mostly bad German results for technical queries if I don't completely remove German there.

Google provides those settings but it seems to randomly ignore them or at least I can't discern a pattern.

It's not randomly. In work I use Iceweasel for private gmail (and Chrome for company gmail), where I have set Results per page to 100 and chose to Never show Instant results long time ago. It simply does not work!

I go to google.com, start typing and Google starts showing me some instant results and hitting Enter gives me only 10 results per page. (The same settings are respected for non-private gmail in Chrome, though.)

And I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. The upside is that if I want German results, I can just go to Google - no annoying configurations, just DDG for English and Google for German. Still, I really resent this behavior by Google.

Just had yet another try at switching to DDG. The results are so extremely inferior to Google that I switched back after I had to use !g for 5 of 5 searches to find what I want.

To get the U.S. results (for eg.), run the query on google.com (google.com/ncr) and then append "&gl=us" to the URL. For eg. compare :

https://www.google.com/search?q=salem&gl=us

https://www.google.co.in/?q=salem&gl=in

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