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:

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

Recently, Danny posted a response to this:

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

Forum discussion at Twitter.