I have that as my homepage to make sure that the cookie is set every time, and I still occasionally end up with search results or google products in non-English.
Agreed. And it annoys the hell out of me if I fire up my Android browser and end up on a Hebrew home page, again.
Somehow I thought that we already had a mechanism to negotiate the language between server and browser. Ah well, let's just ignore Accept-Language, shall we?