Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, posted a message on Twitter and other social networks, apologizing for the ongoing issues and complaints with Google showing the preferred language in the search results. Google said the issue seems to be from mobile sites not being properly configured and Google’s mobile-first indexing being more widespread.

Google said, “We appreciate the concern expressed by those seeking results in a preferred language. This is a priority for us to resolve. We will continue to investigate solutions, but we also need time to ensure those work well.” We have not made any recent change in how our systems determine the languages of results to display. However, as we crawl more of the web on a mobile-first basis, issues may arise when we index multilingual content not properly indicating which version we should display.” Our guidance about multilingual content is here. We’re also further checking our own systems to understand potential issues or improvements we can make. Again, we appreciate the concern. It is a priority for us to address.”

Google also posted the message in Catalan because that is where most of these complaints have been coming from for the past month or so:

Entenem la preocupació dels que busqueu resultats en una llengua concreta. És una de les nostres prioritats i continuem investigant solucions tot i que requereix temps assegurar-se que funcionin de manera perfecte…. https://t.co/qzCYFXmfb3

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 25, 2023

The issue has been going on for a couple months now, here are some older tweets Danny replied to so you can see yourself:

We generally return in the language used for searching and in settings, but sometimes in situations where two languages are widely spoken and understood, that can happen if our systems find info that may be relevant. But passing this on to see if there’s improvements we can make.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 20, 2022

Search terms: Giravolt patrimoni cultural
(all words are in Catalan) pic.twitter.com/JfXHm9hUKd

— Josep M. Ganyet (@ganyet) December 21, 2022

You can see another example if you search for l’oreneta festival terra alta. The first result is in Spanish and I couldn’t find anything wrong with the website -whose default language is Catalan

— Cinta Màdico (@zuruckzugehen) December 21, 2022

Recently, Danny posted a response to this:

As said before, we’re still looking into how to improve things, including helping publishers understand more about making use of our guidance in terms of multilingual content, which helps us in showing content https://t.co/UUfbrLQ3Ne

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 23, 2023

Our documentation talks about hreflang, and we may be encountering some issues with content not marked up properly. But beyond that, we are continuing to investigate the issues being raised. We appreciate & understand the concern and are working to improve.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 24, 2023

Again, we very much appreciate the concern here and are actively investigating these reports. What was mentioned is one issue we think is involved; we’re looking at more. We definitely want to improve things.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 24, 2023

Anyway, Google is working on something but it does not sound like it will be a quick fix.

Forum discussion at Twitter.