I tried out the recommendations for the new Google Homepage service. Here are the very beta results:

http://picasaweb.google.com/kdonovan11/Google/photo#5054915973763844562

To be clear: I don't speak whatever language that is.

I have never gotten a recommendation that contains content from another lanquage. Is it possible that recently you clicked on a couple of search results leading to a website that was in that language, or used another language google domain recently?

They will actually check your browser's preferred language via the language-accept http header. Because I was also surprised as I received a lot of Chinese gadgets in the recommendations, but I checked and it was my fault: I had Chinese set as preferred language in my browser (to test Google.cn). [Firefox -> Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> languages...]

Some Google services unfortunately set a cookie to remember this preferred language setting, so that sometimes leads to bugs – you switch back to e.g. English, and Google will still display some pages in Chinese.

I have a weird result too. This one is not language / character set related.

   Searches
   ------------
   amstel gold race
   Recommended because you searched for postkantoor and selexyz

(Amstel gold race is a cycling race. Postkantoor is Dutch for post office, and Selexyz is a Dutch book store chain.)

Huh? I did indeed perform those two searches, but what in the world to they have to do with a cycling race?

   – Michael