It's like a well known friend reporting that Pornhub translates porn video titles to silly German titles, even though his system and browser run in English.
Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
71–80 of 343 posts
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#72My vote goes to the “Org Too Big, Nobody Cares” explanation. Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world with multiple official languages. Haven't checked this recently, but a while ago Google Maps was still serving street names in a random language (the first name in alphabetical ordering), for streets which have names in multiple languages.
> Or, perhaps just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world where there are multiple official languages As a brit, I am always irked that most of what I browse is locked to US English, as if it's the same thing as British English. At least if your main language is a popular non-English language you get the option to switch to it. This is compounded by those location drop-downs,…
> This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where United States is always in the special top slot
This used to be the case, but it seems to be becoming rare. It’s really annoying actually as alphabetically United States is way down in the list. This is how IP geolocation should be used imho, bubble up the probable location(s) to the top of the list, but DON’T assume the geo is right without asking.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#73The regionalized search results for Google and YouTube are probably the biggest annoyance. Even after setting the language options correctly in the respective services, I still get content suggested which has no relevance to me.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been on holiday to Thailand, and Google most definitely did not use the buddhist calendar for my search results
Behavior is different if you’re logged in and depending on your settings I think.
There's just so many things at play it's really difficult to know what to blame.
When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice.
When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support.
So I just don't use Assistant for anything.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#75Many sites are so infuriating regarding language settings
Tesla Website is one of the worst for this.
I live in Portugal but speak English
Tesla insists on serving up Portuguese and wont even let me select US or UK site.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#76Because of the company VPN, I usually teleport to Israel, and I have absolutely no idea how to change the language on a right-to-left layout with a Hebrew alphabet...
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#77The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization ! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc.…
> ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). Just nitpicking, but "g" stands for "gras", a literal translation of "bold" in the context of typography. > I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions And that's why assigning users to specific services/servers/translations depending on IP is the worst kind of evil. Please let us choose the…
> no, IP addresses don't have a "country"
But, but, IP ranges have a “country” field in the RIPE database!
[Just pointing out it’s a mostly-right (aka subtly-wrong) solution that seems like a really good and straightforward idea at first (sufficiently ignorant) glance.]
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#78I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.
That hasn't been my experience both from running a site in Europe using the accept language header as default and from my anecdotal experience with friends in Asia and Europe.
In general, I think using geoip is much more likely to get things wrong than using the accept language.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#79I met one-on-one with Google’s senior leadership in 2000 to talk about their internationalization efforts. This was very early in their trajectory, so I even sat down with Larry Page and chatted with him for half an hour. A year or two later I’m in Tokyo and talk to a new Google product manager based there. I tell her it is insane that Google serves me Japanese pages on my English-configured PowerBook just because I…
Yes, I also find this infuriating. The list of languages I speak is sent with every request, in the Accept-Language header. And ignored.
My suspicion is that people who actually write code related to this only speak a single language and only use sites in a single country.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#80I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.
Yes, that's exactly my experience. Most people who install windows don't bother to set the locale correctly, so everyone ends up en-US. So if you trust the Accept Language header, you'll get it wrong.
In which country did you see that? I'm curious because that contradicts my experience.