Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

smaller.fish

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 343 posts

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#191

Post by jobigoud »

quitit wrote: post #95
silvestrov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…

Unfortunately the problem exists in both directions. I run my setup entirely in English and Google will still try to squeeze in the local non-english language. Confusingly Google will also write some sentences half in english and half in the local language. E.g. "Google is also available in: " (rather than the full sentence being in the foreign language. It's the kind of attention to detail that I've become accustome…

> E.g. "Google is also available in: "

This specific one might be on purpose to avoid translating language names. If you land in page entirely in Chinese but you see the word "English" in Latin characters under a link, you can click it to escape. But if it's itself in Chinese you'll never find it. I do the same in applications, have a menu for languages but don't translate language names, if you change language by mistake you can always find your way back.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#192

Post by sokoloff »

i80and wrote: post #163
justinmayer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's answer to this problem is, "Just log in! Then we will always know what language you prefer." So Google doesn't make it easier to change that setting because they want you to be logged in all the time so they can track you better.

I had a fascinating issue with Google. I am a monolingual English speaker. I visited Iceland, and as happens, Google started serving UIs in Icelandic even while I was logged in. What was interesting was this continued for weeks after returning to my home country. There was no setting I could find to go back to English; I got good at the specific Icelandic keywords I needed to navigate the UI. Then without any ceremon…

I had a similar experience with (enterprise paid) Outlook365 Webmail (but in Italian, which I do not read). It persisted for several days and then went away before I bothered to chase it down.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#193

Post by donatj »

Years ago I built a language system that parsed Accept-Lang and compared your preferences to what we had available. There was also a drop down at the bottom of the page to manually override.

I thought it worked really slick, but we got complaints. The majority of our users were English speaking despite their Accept-Lang preferences and expected us to serve in English. We switched to just default English with the dropdown there if you want something else. Made me a little sad.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#194

Post by [deleted] »

justinmayer wrote: post #70

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#195

Post by liotier »

silvestrov wrote: post #84
justinmayer wrote: post #70

I 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…

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…

French native speaker here. UX consistency, shared Internet culture, habits from the early 90's and error messages I can actually find on the Web are the reasons why I always set my computing to the english language.

I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that.

On the French-language mandatory corporate Windows laptop, Excel formulas are translated in French - so when searching for recipes on the web I have to translate them !

I enjoy sites such as Thomann.de which have separate settings for language, country and units of measurement.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#197

Post by lazide »

justinmayer wrote: post #70

I 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…

Having been involving in some internal projects and done the data analysis (not in Search, other areas), your guess is correct - far more people get (clearly) wrong results if you serve what the browser is asking for due to mis configuration. It’s easy to tell due to differences in various conversion metrics and huge increases in clicks to language change buttons.

It drove me crazy too before I saw the data. Geo-IP, while not awesome for exactly the scenario you are describing, is more predictable since it gives a set of baseline language/settings that are ‘right’ based on norms in the area, and people know how to navigate out of generally if they’re not the ‘baseline’ user there. (An English speaker in Japan pretty quickly needs to know how to switch languages or learn Japanese or they aren’t going to be able to even navigate the subway/buy tickets for instance!)

Many of the browser based settings get people stuck, especially since most large websites do the same geoip thing now.

It does make it awkward for folks not doing ‘the norm’ in their area, or who have an IP improperly categorized, but statistically they aren’t as common and they figure out how to handle it usually.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#198

Post by mcv »

wutbrodo wrote: post #170
mcv wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These users will still want Google to return results in their native language. Says who? This is a baseless assumption. Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for. And the browser should ask the OS or the user for their language preference. And if IT-support wants one language for the interface in order to facilitate support, they can still set the other language for…

Google has literally billions of users. There are people who are worse at using computers than anyone you've ever met. I'm as irritated as anyone when something doesn't cater to "power users". But if we're trying to understand the reason behind the decision instead of just venting, then it's instructive to consider just how computer-illiterate the non-power-user is for a product as massive as Google Search, and how a…

This isn't about power users. This will affect anyone who finds themselves in a country with a different language. Migrants, expats, refugees, people on vacation, people living in a country with multiple official languages; there are a lot of people for whom Google's way of handling this will give bad results. And it gives bad results in a way the user can't fix. If Google listened to the language settings, the user would have some control over it.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#199

Post by scrollaway »

Symbiote wrote: post #162
silvestrov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium? > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-e…

Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city / area. I speak French. And I don’t want results in French, I want results in English.

Google thinks they known better - they do not.

Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

#200

Post by lokar »

The reason is straight forward. They have data that shows most people outside the US have the setting wrong. For the .com (American!) domain the default is English. For each country specific site the default is the primary local language. You can change the default via a cookie.
Post reply on HN