It all sounds interesting and I've been meaning to drop my corporate job for some time now. So is there a Berlin startup news site (preferably in English) so I could get a feel what kind of startups are there?

EDIT: http://siliconallee.com/ seems to be the thing I was looing for, anything else?

You need to drop your corporate thinking first. I suggest you get into some projects to figure out if you are able to work in and with a startup. Note that I am saying that with a background of 15 years in corporate. ;)

Most of the startups are actually very busy doing stuff (as in they don't are yet at the point understanding what proper Communcation means sigh), but http://hascore.com/ has a good list of links.

I will be posting an overview posting asap with additional links.

Another one: http://venturevillage.eu/

The most important parameter of all is missing i.e. ncr (no country redirect), which, ironically stopped working for me in the last few days.

Can someone confirm that the following query gives non personlized search results?: http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu&ncr=1&pws=0

btw, this thing has been my #1 complaint with google for years. How hard is to make a completly 'neutral' non personalized version of Google available at a specific adress or with a checkbox in your google account.

It's strange how often I see this complaint about wanting a non-personalized version of Google.

On google.com, there is a toggle switch allowing you to turn off personal results on a particular search (it's been there since the launch of SPYW).

And if you're looking for a more permanent setting, there's one available in the Google search preferences (available through the gear on the search results page or at https://www.google.com/preferences) which allows you to set it to "Do not use personal results".

Google still does a horrible job at respecting your browser language. Someone, with very questionable logic, thinks that UI language should be directly related to the physical location of the browser.

Even when explicitly specifying English, it still doesn't work. For example, the alt text for Google logos will appear in the "geo-language", regardless of UI setting.

Other Google sites, such as blogspot, switch to the geo-language without any apparent way to override.

Sometimes, Chrome even kicks in and asks if you'd like to translate the content into the correct language.

This is moronic.

I guess any change to something so big as google search is not simple per se. But my problem is that I think this is their business decision and not a technical problem that needs to be solved as I remember a thread here mentioning that even engineers at Google have a problem with this (that is, personalized seach results)

Given that it worked that way until recently, I'm sort of inclined to say "Already implemented but UI missing."