Google.com is one the best general search engines around, though it is not ‘smart’. It’s fully automated and as they say “Computer are fast, accurate, morons.” Thus, if you plan to travel to another country and will be using Google from your laptop you’ll probably get stuck being sent to that countries localized version of Google.
For example, if you travel to Poland and enter in “http://www.google.com” in your browser you will automatically redirected to “http://www.google.pl”. “Google.PL” is the Polish version of Google. But what if you don’t speak or read Polish and need to navigate through it?
All you have to do is go to this link (and bookmark it!):
This is a special page on Google which allows you to change the interface language at will. The “en” is the symbol for English. If you want another language just substitute ‘en’ for the language symbol of your choice. You can get the link to a list of the symbols below.
There is something to watch out for though: There is a difference between “Web Interface Language” and “Search Language”. The Web Interface Langauge, the hl part of the link, is what sets the language you see. Your version of Google show up in English, German or even Arabic if you set the appropriate language code.
The Search Language is the language for the websites which will be searched. So, if you want to only see Spanish websites put “lr=lang_es” on the link to make it look something like this (if you want to see Google in English with Spanish results):
Though that probably wont work because of how the system works. SO, if you really want Spanish website results you’ll have to enter the search directly into the link like so:
Now as you may have noticed, I switched from the ‘webhp’ link to ‘search’. That is because the ‘webhp’ link is kind of specialized. No need to worry about it. If all you want is English then the ‘webhp’ link is the best choice. If you want full customization with language go with the search link.
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What is the technical different between using “webhp” and “search” ?
Hey David,
I cannot say for certain the ‘technical’ difference between the two except that webhp always leads to the English website with US results. That’s about it as far as I know.