I’m based in a non-English-speaking country, but I regularly search in English, especially for technical topics.
My Google account, my laptop, my phone, my interface language, and preferences are all set to English; only my physical location and payment methods are local.
What happens is that Google increasingly returns localized results in my native language and aggressively applies automatic translation.
Some concrete behaviors I’m seeing:
- Queries written in English still prioritize pages in Portuguese, even when equivalent English sources exist.
- Reddit results are often force-translated instead of linking to the original English content.
- “AI mode” responses are always in Portuguese, even when the prompt is clearly in English, with no visible way to force output language.
- The UI offers a choice between “Portuguese” and “All web,” but selecting “All web” doesn’t reliably return English results nor disable translation.
- In practice, explicit query language seems to be overridden by inferred user preferences (location / account language).
I’m curious whether others are seeing the same behavior, and whether there’s any way to restore search to become 100% useful again; or what are you using since this really limits search results, especially for technical things.
https://www.google.com/preferences?lang=1
YouTube is the worst offender these days. I get Portuguese videos auto-dubbed to English and vice-versa even though I can understand both and with no way to disable other than account switching.
It also can't tell Portuguese from Spanish in search queries.
Recommended!
Some times I need to switch to Spain, or Japan, or just disable it due to geo blocking. I use Mullvad, which makes this easier, but TBH the main practical use of my VPN is what you mention, I never want results in Japanese and Google is very bad at getting the hint.
The worst one I keep noticing is MDN, I know there's an article in perfectly fine English but why am I always redirected to the local language one? That's not even location-dependent.
I run a small personal VPN, but not one of these company solutions, might be time to do that.
Some people may want translation, mostly people that only speak a single language. But for most bilingual people, being forced a translation (a lower quality one), is a worse experience. I'm surprised that no one at Google has pushed back this anti-user behavior. It is like no one at Google knows more than one language.
The worst part is when traveling. Google ignores the browser settings, so it throws me Japanese or German website, even if my browser settings clearly says English then Spanish.
They are trying so hard to be smart that the Chrome locale is determined from your GPS location, which creates obvious problems. I tried to change it once using the Sensors in dev tools in order to get rid of the AM/PM in time input fields, to no avail. You do not simply get the 24h time format.
ETA: https://www.google.com/advanced_search appears to give options for tuning your language and region in the search results. I haven't used it personally in ages, but it may give you what you're looking for.
Google could benefit from the same idea: an expert mode where explicit signals override inference with genuinely usable advanced search features (language, filters, etc) as first-class tools.
brave search ecosia (environment focused) qwant mojeek (a little bit obscure) swisscows (once again obscure)
There is also searx and searxng and their public instances which actually are a mix of many of the search providers I listed about.
Giving references to anyone whose interested perhaps but duckduckgo is a good option to start out and its something that I myself use.
It is the same shit. Dear duckduckgo, when I ask for results in English (or in other language), I mean it.
It looks like those days Google and duckduckgo are also hallucinating. You aske some terms, in a specific order, and get something which has no relation, whatsoever, with the search query.
The result is an Italian cooking demo where the chef exclaims “MULTA BENE!” and the AI voice deadpans “it is very good.”
I’m sure it’s even more annoying when you’re bilingual and can’t turn it off.
At least on this point now it is possible to turn it off.
It's very annoying. Put this in a search query to filter them out: -inurl:?tl=
Other people might have given more credible information about how to fix it but I am on duckduckgo for 2 years now and I seriously love it and It doesn't have any of these issues.
If your workflow allows so, definitely give duckduckgo (Or other private search engines like brave,startpage,ecosia etc.) a try as well.
No seriously, I’m sure 2026 is the year the finest engineers in the world finally learn about Accept-Language and the fact that physical location != spoken language.
Instead of trying to figure out who has set it correctly first, and then use it if they have, they always default to language and search results for your location.
I can get the location bit: they want/need to show you local ads, so they push local shops to you too (and just maybe, you do want stuff nearby), but language?
But really, Google has been defaulting to a language based on GeoIP data for a long time now.
worked, I will bookmark this for now, hope it keeps working. Thanks.
My theory was that Reddit was shotgunning LLM-translated versions of posts at Google in a bunch of languages to increase hit rate. Maybe Google's really at fault.
Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to find anything on Google thanks to all the transparent autoensloppification of everything, everywhere.
With DuckDuckGo, you are being served non-targeted ads. If you go through the trouble of setting anything up to avoid some of the public search engine pitfalls, you are paying with time and effort, and maybe even subscriptions on top like VPN and similar.
Obviously, ad networks want people to have this mindset, and while I have no issue with "stick it to them", it's always going to be an uphill battle.
I actually believe we need distributed and federated p2p search engine built, but trusting the results is hard with that: perhaps this is where blockchain approach (to store hashes of indexed pages?) could bring real value?
A VPN might win on price (sometimes? kagi is just $5/mo), but relocating countries to get better results when searching for code related stuff feels a bit over-optimized. And as we know, premature optimization is the root of all evil.
I’m curious, why not? The amount of time and frustration saved seems insane, which seems to be a net positive, unless you can’t afford it of course (which is a good argument, but I’m not seeing any in your comment).
This will trigger the Kagi subscribers to respond defensively
Tor is free
Why doesnt Google have an .onion address like DDG
Though I primarily use Kagi now.
e.g. If I search "world's best pizza" the top Google result is a random local pizza joint that isn't even top-5 in my medium-sized city (but who have included "worldsgreatestpizza" in their long URL), and then a bunch of Facebook results. Kagi's top couple results are sites with rankings of (ostensibly) the world's top pizza restaurants.
cr=country<two letter>
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
p.s.: YMMV, sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, most of the time works but there is no determinism
It used to be the case that if your query was in one language you’d get results in that language but not anymore. I regularly get a mix of multiple languages and even translated stuff. I've even seen multiple AI blocks in the same results page in two different languages.
It's a mess. I don't think anyone at Google knows what's going on anymore.
I know it because there lots of information that don't show on my devices but does on many others away from me. It's annoying to say the very least.
Though I suspect this won't last once LLMs start inserting ads and promoted content into responses.
Spoiler alert if you haven't watched truman
But That is incredibly uncanny and I think this is the reason why, I think truman must have caught what's happening and also I saw this youtube video trying to explain that truman knew about the show the whole time and the scene and the time he was digging dirt in the first scenes of the movie, he was actually digging his escape route.
I'd ironically like more results in certain languages - just not language of the VPN location.
Drives me nuts.
This isn't a coincidence. I'd bet this is so they can inflate their adoption numbers to justify further involvement in the AI race to their shareholders.
Which, to me, is a very string sign that we're in a massive "solution looking for a problem" bubble. We've been there before. We know how it ends.
Not only Google. Duckduckgo does the same.
also https://www.google.com/?hl=en might be effective
Should fix your localized results problem.
If I don't allow Google to know where I am, I don't get location based responses. This is extremely easy to test in incognito mode.
If I enable it I instantly get things specific to the area I live in.
Your problem start here. Don't give Google your phone number, location, or payment information. Google is a monstrous surveillance machine. If you can't do without Google search for some reason, at least use a VPN or Tor.