How can I make Google do one-shot searches in a specific language only?

Question

When I use Google to search the web, I usually get German results first and English results later when I use search terms that make sense in both languages. Since I am German and live in Germany, this is usually what I want.

However, when I search for technical information, I often want only the English search results since they are much more relevant and of higher quality.

I could start fiddling with my browser settings or try to make Google honor the search settings, but then I would be stuck with the English results even when looking for a local Brauereiausschank.

So what I am looking for is a way to specifiy that I only want English results as a part of the search query, e.g. like this:

Google search: invalid partition table lang:en

Similiar to how I can search for cafe loc:Brandenburger Tor to search for a coffee shop near a specific location.

Does such a syntax exist or can this be achieved in a different way?

Answer 1

You can add the following parameters to the query to limit your search to a particular language:

&lr=lang_xx&hr=xx

Where xx is the language code you want to search in (like en for English, de for German, etc.)

For example:

https://www.google.hu/search?q=invalid%20partition%20table&lr=lang_en&hr=en

or

https://www.google.hu/search?q=invalid%20partition%20table&lr=lang_de&hr=de

The first one will show English, while the second one will show German results

Answer 2

I found a few ways to search for language specific results with slightly different results.

1. I use Chrome as browser and make use of coded search engines: right-click in a search field on a search page (e.g. google.de) and select "add as search engine". Provide a shortcut (Chrome calls it a keyword) for searching, e.g., "gd" (google deutsch). Then, in order to search, type gd in the address bar, followed by your search terms.

2. Create a search engine on the Google Advanced Search page: https://www.google.com/advanced_search First select the language for the search results. Then right-click in the "all these words" field and choose "add as search engine", select keyword to your liking and voila, it works. The results are slightly different.

3. I just discovered www.2lingual.com and created a search engine for that page as well (2L), after first selecting my two preferred languages. This allows you to simultaneously google in two languages.

I think these are 3 fairly good options, compared to typing &lr=lang_xx&hr=xx every single time you want to search in a specific language. You can make as many "search engines" for as many languages or other search preferences as you can remember to be entered in the address bar of your browser.

Answer 3

If you click the Search Settings link (in the gear drop-down), you should be able to set the default language for Google, and then include other languages.

Google makes it clear that the default language is always included:

Google Search automatically returns results in the language you choose for Google product text, but you can also request results in many other languages.

I did a quick test, setting the default to German, and including English, and the results seemed to reflect what you want.

Another option, depending on your browser, that could fairly easily deal with this issue is to create a separate (in your case "dev") profile, in which you set the default Google UI language to English.