How do you make Google's interface always be in your chosen language?
- by Michael Wolf
Google's interface and search results don't always appear in my preferred language, English. I'm located in Mexico City and, although I generally have no problem with Spanish, I would prefer search results in English most of the time. (The exception is when I'm using search terms in Spanish.) I'd also prefer the interface to be in English, but that's far less important to me than search results.
Google looks at your IP to decide where you're coming from and thus what language to present results in. So, when I type www.google.com into the URL bar, it redirects me to www.google.com.mx.
Is there a way to force Google to use one language all the time?
Here are some things I've done and tried:
0) I have a Google account, and I've configured it such that it should know that English is my preferred language. I don't often explicitly log out of Google, so generally Google knows I'm me and my preferences when I access its services.
1) I've configured my browser to ask for pages in English. Very few sites support this feature at all; Google isn't one of them.
2) From www.google.com.mx, I can click on "Google.com in English". This works until, I think, I close the browser.
2a) From www.google.com.mx, I can go into account configuration, which is English. From then on, everything's in English.
3) I can append &hl=en (Human Language = English) to the end of the URLs of result pages.
2, 2a, and 3 all "work", but they're all mildly annoying. I'd rather avoid them if I could.
(At the risk of stating the obvious, English and Spanish are the languages I'm dealing with, but I imagine that, say, a francophone using Google from Korea would run into basically the same issue.)
