Filed under: Internet | Tags: cookies, english, firefox, google, Internet, languages, paranoia, searching
Just a little tech tip that might be useful. If you have found yourself in a country where you don’t speak the language particularly well, you may find that searching in Firefox is less helpful than it could be because google.com automatically redirects you to the local version of Google for the country you’re in. Well, there’s an easy way to fix it, and a hard way. This entry is about the hard way. Go to the folder where Firefox is saved (on Windows, that’s C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox) then open the searchplugins folder. Edit the file google.xml using Wordpad. Just under the line where it says:
<Param name=”q” value=”{searchTerms}”/>
Insert the line:
<Param name=”hl” value=”en”/>
Restart Firefox and from now on searches will come up with results in English. You could change “en” to the language code for any language you like.
The less paranoid among you will have just allowed Google to save cookies on your computer and set your language preference yourself. I pity the fools!
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Or…you could do an advanced search and request the language for results:
http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search?hl=en
What I’d find really useful, though, would be a way of finding sites in US or UK from either google.com or .co.uk
btw…apparently, if you google ‘google’ – it breaks the internet!
Comment by Edward the Bonobo September 27, 2007 @ 11:22 am(from last week’s ‘The IT Crowd’)
Or…do an advanced search and select English:
http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search?hl=en
What I’d find really handy is a way of returning US or UK results from google.com or .co.uk. Or any country, come to that. Currently I’m looking for hotels in Gothenburg, and Google Maps keeps showing me Gothenburg VA. Do you get Paris, Texas?
btw…apparently if you google ‘google’, it breaks the internet!
Comment by Edward the Bonobo September 27, 2007 @ 11:26 am(from last week’s ‘The IT Crowd’)
Note: two comments from Ed because they were spam filtered for some reason.
Yep, your solution works fine, but for those of us who are too lazy to open up google, open the advanced search page, then type in our search, and just want to use the search bar at the top of the firefox window, that’s no good.
Paris, Texas scores sufficiently lower in google’s system that it’s never been a problem for me.
I do remember though in the early days of the internet, I was in a chat room and said I was from London. They said something like: “oh wow! I didn’t realise they had the internet in Canada”.
You can’t do ’sites in the US’ as far as I know, but you can always find sites in the UK by including “site:.uk” in the search box.
Comment by Dan | thesamovar September 27, 2007 @ 1:52 pmOn IE I automatically get Google.es, on Firefox I get Google.com.
Go figure…
Comment by azahar September 27, 2007 @ 1:55 pmthanks!
Comment by ed October 30, 2008 @ 2:48 amYou are the man!!!!!
Comment by Sabbione November 4, 2008 @ 1:28 pmI work for an american country in Europe but we use IP addresses from a dutch provider, so I get redirected to google.nl all the times. it was pretty annoying until I found your post!!
Many thanks dude.
I have always been able to google search with no problem, but for about 2 weeks now, every time I try to search, a foreign language comes up and I don’t know how to get the language off and English back on….very frustrating.
Comment by norma deason November 20, 2008 @ 6:18 pmHope you can help me. Thanks.
How can I get back to English, as the language on my Google searches? I don’t know how a foreign language (French) got on it to begin with….this trouble started about 2 weeks ago. Norma G. Deason
Comment by norma deason November 20, 2008 @ 6:20 pmHow do I do this on a Mac? There is no folder for Firefox anywhere on the Mac, nor is there a google.xml document anywhere. I’m in the Middle East and everything is coming up in Arabic!! Thanks for any help you can offer. I’m on an Intel Mac running 10.5.5 and Firefox 3.0.4.
Comment by Marc December 6, 2008 @ 4:22 pmNo idea about Macs I’m afraid. I would have thought there would be the same folder somewhere, but on a Mac I wouldn’t know where to start looking.
Comment by Dan | thesamovar December 6, 2008 @ 9:49 pmI live in Thailand and California. I am in hailand and my Google saerch page has suddenly displaied the Thai language!! How do I change it back to English???
Comment by Richard Nickey December 10, 2008 @ 8:25 amThanks, this is really useful!
For Macs 1.go to your applications folder and right click (or control-click) on firefox.app 2.click “show package contents” 3.Open MacOS folder 4.Open in the “searchplugins” folder
Comment by natemb February 8, 2009 @ 10:24 pmPlease change my search engine back to English from French.
Comment by sammy blanco February 18, 2009 @ 11:43 pmHi
I had this problem too, travelling for work in Greece and Japan. I eventually wrote a (very small & trivial) greasemonkey script which fixes it.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46741
The nice thing is that it allows you to stay in google search of the country you’re in, but just changes everything to english. Also works with the firefox google search toolbar.
If you’re using firefox, then GreaseMonkey is a very handy way of moulding your internet to your needs.
If you’re not using firefox, then, man, I just don’t know *shakes head, shrugs shoulders, and walks away, broken and dejected*…
Comment by glenton April 16, 2009 @ 2:20 amUseful script, thanks for that! Never got around to tinkering with GreaseMonkey but it seems pretty handy.
Comment by Dan | thesamovar April 16, 2009 @ 10:20 amThanks for this! I am in a new country every month and it is annoying. Note: It didn’t work when I copy and pasted what you had because it made unrecognizable – ” – but when I manually changed it everything is fine. Thanks for this tip!
Comment by Vertical Jump Trainer May 10, 2009 @ 8:20 pmactually it is much easier. type http://www.google.com and it will redirect you to the http://www.google.xx page. Then click at the preferences link, (it’ s the middle one on the right), and choose to show everything on English and search for english pages. You should not have any further problems.
Comment by nuwuanda July 23, 2009 @ 12:23 pmAnd every time I restart Firefox it is back to Spanish in my case.
Comment by Kurt October 20, 2009 @ 6:03 pmSearch in English
Comment by Anonymous September 20, 2009 @ 8:26 pm