This isn't a problem for me on the pc, but on the iPhone, sometimes I want to kill someone it is so annoying. Even though the OS itself is totally language-localized, there is no setting to choose the language of the built-in google search in safari, and it always ends up searching in Japanese for me.
OK, so let's make a bookmark to a localized google. Hey, there is a built-in main-page bookmark to Google! Which you cannot edit.
So you have to jump through so many hoops that I just grit my teeth while a search for "widget-342 review" returns 10 pages in japanese that all contain the word "review" in katakana. Sometimes the small-mindedness of these half-baked localizations is extremely annoying, all the more so because I know the engineers that wrote it have almost certainly NEVER tested their code except as "US English, operating on a US network".
I don't get why Google doesn't respect the Accept-Language header. Even though my Firefox is sending this as en, I get redirected to google.co.jp. Is there a reason why most sites ignore this header and favour ip range based redirection?
By using that, you wouldn't exactly be making a statement against all this bullshit localization and forced redirection to local sites, with results in local languages preferred to the stuff I'm actually searching for.
If I wanted to go to www.gooogle.MYCOUNTRYCODE I would have gone there, and not www.google.com. The fact that google seems to forget these settings between Firefox sessions as well pissed me off enough to just set this up.
I guess I'm a stubborn bastard that way, but I thought others might enjoy the service too. It comes neatly with a opensearch provider to replace google so that it's next to no work doing the switch.
On a privacy plus side, this is a google-proxy which sends out none of your confidential data and requires no cookies, and hence leaves your search anonymized, although that is more of a side-effect than any specifically desired feature on my part.
OK, so let's make a bookmark to a localized google. Hey, there is a built-in main-page bookmark to Google! Which you cannot edit.
So you have to jump through so many hoops that I just grit my teeth while a search for "widget-342 review" returns 10 pages in japanese that all contain the word "review" in katakana. Sometimes the small-mindedness of these half-baked localizations is extremely annoying, all the more so because I know the engineers that wrote it have almost certainly NEVER tested their code except as "US English, operating on a US network".