This will be quick.
So I had an issue with a user from Beijing performing searches against a site, but no search results would appear. After some investigation, ie a couple of late nights of virtual troubleshooting sessions with the user, I discovered that SharePoint search was interpreting the query by way of the local language settings. Given that this user's local language was Mandarin, the English word searches he was performing did not make sense to SharePoint. To resolve his issue, it required me to adjust the default query language setup on the search results page. Here's how I did it:
I performed a search to navigate directly to the search results window. Next, the page was placed in edit mode. Under the "Search Core Results" webpart, I edited the properties. Expanding the "Results Query Options" section, I picked "English" as the default Query Language and saved my changes.
Voilà, it worked!
