Good question. I just saw an expert in the hallway and asked him. The basic answer is that your preference is stored in a cookie, so the preference would be forgotten if you're clearing cookies. If you still have the same cookie and yet the "no country redirect" isn't sticking, that's a bug we could dig into.
By the way, I asked why the "no country redirect" isn't stored with your Google account rather with a cookie. The main reason he gave was that whether to do a country redirect is one of the first things we decide, and it's faster to use a cookie for that than to go looking up the user's account setting. Or at least, cookies have been faster up until this point. Hope that helps explain things.
I regularly see this without clearing cookies, so yes, I would consider this a bug.
There seems to be no discernible pattern as to why it works in one session, suspend laptop, go somewhere else and it stops working. Or it'll work twice in a row and when I return location a (both in the same foreign country), it stops working.
Interesting. HN isn't ideal for debugging, but if you wanted to send cookies or IP addresses (e.g. via Twitter), I could see if someone could look into it.
FANTASTIC TIP! This drives me (and 3 co-workers who will want to buy you a beer) insane - I travel a lot, and use proxies - so google is constantly swapping languages on me.
Though it makes me less worried about them collating all my personal information if they can't figure out I didn't suddenly learn to speak German ;)
Cant easily do this as i am currently in country. Can you shoot me a contact email (mine is HN username @ gmail) and I can send you something when I'm on the road again and can send you cookies/IP
By the way, I asked why the "no country redirect" isn't stored with your Google account rather with a cookie. The main reason he gave was that whether to do a country redirect is one of the first things we decide, and it's faster to use a cookie for that than to go looking up the user's account setting. Or at least, cookies have been faster up until this point. Hope that helps explain things.