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What the title says. For instance, searching on google.com/ncr (no country redirect):

enter image description here

I speak none of these languages. I'm searching for the meaning of an English word, using English terms, I expect answers in English. Leaving apart questions of why are these Google search suggestions so stupid (specially considering I never click any of them, I never open pages in these languages and I know Google still tracks this despite my best efforts, and it also knows I'm nowhere near India or Pakistan etc, but still it won't learn), what can I do to block these, apart from blocking search suggestions entirely by means of an ad blocker?

I've seen a very similar, almost duplicate question (Remove Google Search suggestions) but that one asks about Chrome's omnibox and is also open to other languages that the OP is familiar with. I'm personally not interested in any language other than the one I'm using to write the search query in.

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    Whoa, this has an entry in the Urban Dictionary.
    – Marc.2377
    Commented May 18, 2019 at 5:06
  • I’m voting to close this question because since 2017 Google no longer redirects to country specific domains, making the use of www.google.com/ncr non-sensical. Commented Oct 27, 2023 at 2:40
  • @Rubén The problem however is not specific to do with the ncr bit. It still happens no matter what Google [sub]domain you use. Thank you for mentioning the rationale for closing the question; as it gives me the opportunity to protest against it.
    – Marc.2377
    Commented Oct 27, 2023 at 3:18
  • Saying that you disagree / protest the closing is insufficient to reopen the question. Please improve the question and remove the /ncr part. Please bear in mind that the title should summarize the question body. Considering this, "what the title says" is not a good way to star the question body. Add details like the name and version of your web browser. The question mentions that a workaround other than using an ad blocker but you have posted an answer about using an ad blocker. You might either move the answer as part of the question or post a new question. Commented Oct 27, 2023 at 3:29
  • @Rubén [Edited] nevermind. I don't have the time and energy to deal with this now.
    – Marc.2377
    Commented Oct 27, 2023 at 3:46

5 Answers 5

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These are predictions of Google Search algorithm based on rank (frequency of global searches) and all you can do at this moment (apart of Adblocking them) is to report them back like:

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As for the reason why all of them are languages spoken in India - with a population of over 1.4 billion people India has no national language. The Constitution of India designates 22 official languages (out of 60!). These are:

| Assamese    | ~  15.30 million |
| Bengali     | ~  97.20 million |
| Bodo        | ~   1.48 million |
| Dogri       | ~   2.60 million |
| Gujarati    | ~  55.50 million |
| Hindi       | ~ 528.50 million |
| Kannada     | ~  43.70 million |
| Kashmiri    | ~   6.80 million |
| Konkani     | ~   2.25 million |
| Maithili    | ~  13.60 million |
| Malayalam   | ~  34.80 million |
| Manipuri    | ~   1.80 million |
| Marathi     | ~  83.10 million |
| Nepali      | ~   2.90 million |
| Odia        | ~  37.50 million |
| Punjabi     | ~  33.10 million |
| Sanskrit    | ~   0.02 million |
| Santali     | ~   7.30 million |
| Sindhi      | ~   2.70 million |
| Tamil       | ~  69.10 million |
| Telugu      | ~  81.10 million |
| Urdu        | ~  50.70 million |
| and English | ~ 125.62 million |

Applying simple math to it, there is a lot of millions of people searching daily for word meanings especially when some of these languages are nothing alike (meaning wise - in all meanings).

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    If I can add something extra to this, albeit somewhat speculatory, it could be that the word "meaning" in Indian English (since sometimes words take on different meanings) actually means "translation". So something like resistance meaning in Hindi could actually be intended to mean resistance in Hindi or resistance translation in Hindi. Commented Oct 28, 2020 at 9:30
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When looking up meanings I type e.g. "alacrity def" instead of "alacrity meaning". Google completes it to "alacrity definition" and doesn't give me suggestions to translate it into languages.

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What can I do to block these, apart from blocking search suggestions entirely by means of an ad blocker?

Block them with a prefix if you are doing a bunch of similar searches, or a suffix if you want to see what comes up prior to blocking. This disables alternative language suggestions:

Prefix or Suffix your search terms

Notice that prefixing or suffixing your terms still offers suffixed suggestions. The shortest term you can use seems to be: "Engl something meaning", if you need more room on the input line, but it results in the same output line length.

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  • Hi. How do I write such a rule?
    – Marc.2377
    Commented May 18, 2019 at 20:57
  • Type it, as shown in the image.
    – Rob
    Commented May 18, 2019 at 21:06
  • Oh, I understand now. I admitm though, I don't like this workaround - it takes more effort for what should be obvious (if I wanted results in italian I would search significato di qualcosa and would probably do so from google.it.
    – Marc.2377
    Commented May 18, 2019 at 23:49
  • You are allowed to write your own answer and choose it as correct. You can also write Google and complain that such 'search suggestions' should be regional. If you asked for "the best restaurant" you wouldn't want all the first few pages to be in India and the next few in China; unless you happen to live there (and near the place suggested). -- You understand that by using my answer that you set the algorithm to prefer what you want.
    – Rob
    Commented May 19, 2019 at 0:27
  • Ah yes, exactly. The interesting things is that indeed when searching for restaurants, I get results that are close to my location and that's very useful. Well thanks for your answer in any case. I added my own (right after asking the question, in fact), but the system won't let me accept it for another 24 hours.
    – Marc.2377
    Commented May 19, 2019 at 5:03
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Getting a bit semantic, but the grammatical phrasing of your query is mostly to blame. See, the meaning of a word does not change when it is spoken in another language. "Equipo" and "Team" both mean the same thing. What you want to know is "how to say it in ____". And since Google realizes you don't have to type out "how to say it" every time, they make it easy to query that in as few characters as possible. Your query should be: [WORD]+in+[space].

Of course, certain terms like "chilaquiles", "research", or "program" will predict results like in chili in a crockpot, in psychology, in Python, rather than spoken languages, but you get the idea. Google predictive results for spoken languages OS X 10.14.4

Chrome Version 74.0.3729.157 (Official Build) (64-bit)

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    Hi, welcome and thanks for answering. I'm afraid you misunderstood my search intention in this case, though. While I'm familiar with the [word] in [language] expression, when searching for the meaning of something I actually want to see its meaning (i.e. read the full definition and examples of how a word is used).
    – Marc.2377
    Commented May 22, 2019 at 3:58
  • I was getting to something similar in my comment on @user0's answer. It is the grammatical phrasing of Indian English that causes this problem. I think what Indians intend to search for is [word] in [language] but type [word] meaning in [language] instead. But English grammar changes with time and location, and Indian English has dozens of evolved grammar that sound awkward in British or American English. Commented Oct 28, 2020 at 9:33
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For the time being, I came up with the following adblock rule:

www.google.com##.erkvQe > li.sbct:has-text(/\S+ meaning in \w+$/)

It's a little fragile, as the navigation keys up/down still picks the suggestions, and search suggestions having the string "meaning in " followed/ending with an word other than a language name will be hidden - e.g. resistance meaning in english will be (correctly) hidden, but resistance meaning in engineering or resistance meaning in electronics will also be, and that may be undesired.

But for me at least, this will do fine.

Demo:

demonstration of element picker from uBlock Origin

References:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-filters
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax
https://www.rexegg.com/regex-quickstart.html

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