I was in Afghanistan for 6 months, and got back in November of last year. While there, I paid for and used internet service on my personal computer with a local vendor, as many people there do. I also created a gmail account while there. It seems now, that after the first time I log into that account, from any computer, said computer thinks I’m still in Afghanistan, and Google comes up in both English and Arabic, with all the search results coming up that way, too. It happens even after I log out of that account.
It sounds like it set up a proxy. To check, on the menu bar, click Tools, then click on ‘Options’ which should be near the bottom. This will bring up a new window.
On the far right, click the ‘advanced’ tab. Under that are 4 other tabs. Click ‘network.’ The option for ‘no proxy’ should be checked. If not, that might be the issue.
edit: not to be paranoid, but unless that was encrypted, I would be on the alert of any signs of identity theft.
I just re-read your OP. I DID see this the first time but “from any computer” part didn’t register. Even so, I should have understood that the proxy stuff wasn’t an issue since it’s specific to google. Sorry.
Have you looked at your account settings? From any google site, if you’re logged in, in the upper right there should be an icon with your current id. If you click on that and then click on account it brings up various options including choice of primary and secondary language. Hope that helps.
I cleared cookies, and that worked. I also checked, and my primary language is listed on that account as English (American). So, aside from using a private browsing session every time I check that account, is there a way to tell Google, hey, I really don’t speak Arabic?
If it’s also happening on other computers, then as you’ve said, it has to be tied to that Google account. Was there a secondary language selected? You would need to delete that.
Aside from that, I don’t see anything else in the account settings that would cause you to get sites coming up in both languages.
edit: try the google dashboard - click products on the left then on the right dashboard
The only other thing I can think of is that the account you log into doesn’t end in .com but in .af or something like that.
Then you’re going to get a session cookie for google saying that you’re in Afghanistan and you’ll have to remove that manually. But you can remove just that cookie.
Go to tools–>options–>privacy
Click on ‘show cookies’ In the search box type google or google.af and it should come right up.
Sorry for the double post, but that’s still really odd. I use VPN’s that connect from other countries where English isn’t the primary language and I run into this problem all of the time. For example when I just checked my google cookies, I have several from google.fr.
But as soon as I change to a US VPN, google reads my IP address as being US based and responds accordingly when I do a search. So it odd that this problem persists beyond just the email account. Of course I can’t say that I’ve ever actually created any of my google email accounts while logged in to a foreign VPN.
Heh, at least I THINK that’s what it means. I first saw it five minutes ago when researching this issue and it bugged me that I didn’t know what those three letters meant, so I kept looking until I found a source that defined it. Not sure how accurate it is.
I’m in Guam and mine gets set to Japanese from time to time. On the main google splash page, under the search bar, it has a “google.com” link. Clicking on that sets it back to 'merican.
That’s all I know.
