When I enter a string on the address bar and press enter, which should search against the default engine, I get passed to google.de and all search results are in German.

I live in Ireland and have my default search Engine set to the Google's Irish site (google.ie). In fact, none of the configured engines have any references to German sites.

Is this something I'm going wrong? Is there some option I'm just not seeing? Or should I just report it as a bug to Google?

I had similar encounter before it appeared to be malware which causing this. after full scan with norton and remove the malware it gone back to normal.

im not sure if this is the same case for you but it would be good to start here

I have the same problem. I am in Spain but use google in English.

Whenever I use the address bar to do a search, the engine used is NOT the default but is www.google.es - this is not what I want as all results are in Spanish.

I have tried changing my preferences to English but they always default to Spanish. My default search engine is set to www.google.com

What should I do to fix this?