so far get sent to the Italian version of: google, yahoo, wikipedia, chrome “google address bar search”, hotmail… sure there are more waiting…

not sure it’s a big brother thing, just bad software design, like everybody who is IN a country is FROM that country…

Google is exactly the ‘BIG BROTHER’ (in the making) that we all feared and were warned against in the first Apple computer’s BIG BROTHER ads.

This “geo-location” BS (it’s not even a subtle hint…it’s a “in your face”, “tough sh*t! What can you do anyway?” complete disregard for right of privacy) cannot be anymore clearer that Google is exactly BIG BROTHER in the making!

And the stupidity of it…It’s amazing. I mean…didn’t it occur to anyone working at Google that there are countless internet users around the world that whose preferred language of internet us is not the one spoken locally? They are called expatriates or people of foreign origins whose number since globalization or even before which have now exploded to the point that if disregarded by any technological innovation, it clearly demonstrates the team or even the company of such innovation is made up of morons who are not sophisticated enough to incorporate this fact-of-reality into their design, and thus their design should be recognized as “obsoleted the minute it was introduced”, i.e an inferior design, or “the malevolent act of introducing a design clearly inferior and insufficient before it was made sufficient and caught-up with the times”.

Conclusion: Google is THE BIG BROTHER in the making, and it’s a very poor and outright shamelessly pathetic and humiliating attempt at that. It should be deemed the shame of human technology to see such disregard for “high standard”, and does not bode well for the wrongs that future technological “advancements” will bring to humanity.

The only way out is to connect to proper Google.com results over a proxy server.

Even worse, my search behavior feels totally different searching “English pages” on Google.fr vs just plain search via Google.com. Lots of French words in the top ten pages, and the results are much less useful to me.

This seems like a pretty easy issue to avoid: 1) provide a manual override as suggested above and 2) if a user is logged in for God’s sake don’t switch the UI and language out from under them. Pretty simple.

Agree that manual override is essential. Only Google would put the knowledge of a computer above the knowledge of a human!

Also I was always able to search on google.fr, google.de, google.co.uk , etc.. without being redirected.

In addition in all the Google services I can choose the language I want to see the interface in, so.. I can browse anytime google.es in Chineese!

Maybe that screenshot wasn’t the best example (as you point out, they may be legally oblidged to filter by IP address when it comes to using the gmail name), however, the same thing holds true for all Google services. The home page appears in German, as do all the Google apps.

Away from issues that have legal considerations I agree! When I go to France on holiday I don’t want to second guess Google… I mean not everyone in France or even England speak the native language!!!

I’ve looked everywhere, and there is no button or option anywhere to manually override the language settings.

I’m all for localisation, but make it user controlled! Sometimes we prefer to read a site in the language in which it was originally written, rather than in a (sometimes) sloppily or inaccurately translated version.