If you search for an english book title on Amazon.de it gets auto-translated to german. I first saw this a couple of weeks ago and it was super confusing. Chances are the search results will be nonsense or empty.
Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
211–220 of 343 posts
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#212Earlier 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…
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…
Tip:Pretend to be Irish. You get English, but you also get SI and euro.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#213I really wish you could specify the search language or internationalisation.
Sometimes I search in English, French, Italian, Czech or Ukrainian, I also split time between Canada, France and Czech Republic, can read all these languages well enough to want contextual results for each, but inevitably I still get results focused only on my actual location which is slightly infuriating...
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#214Earlier 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…
Aw man, Google UK's search "tools" feature doesn't understand UK nor ISO date formats. Such a strange choice to make.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#215I 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…
These users will still want Google to return results in their native language.
There are several layers available to Google though -
- They could use the system language setting
- They could use the browser's language setting
- They could use the user's Google account setting if the user is logged in
Corporations could set the system language, or the browser language, and it could still be overridden by the user in their Google account if they wanted to do that. Instead though, Google chooses to geolocate the user's IP address and use that which works for no one.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#216I 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…
Can I add a category for your wall of shame? Services that couple language and location, so that even though they have done the work of having an English localization, it's not available in my location.
Financial services and airlines are the worst offenders. SAS, Degiro, Amazon off the top of my head all do this.
Degiro has the added bonus of totally breaking under Google Translate so I went to the trouble of using a browser extension to rewrite the request for their localisation strings file to fetch the English version. I'm sure there are some legal disclaimers that are missing here and there but it works fine.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I firmly disagree with all of the above. If a site absolutely needs to know where I am in that moment, they can ask me, and I will decide where I am for the purposes of that particular site. To pick one of a myriad of examples, I often buy software, books, etc. via the web. I don't need sites to assume I want to pay in Euro just because my IP address in that moment happens to be associated with a European IP address…
Well, your example will be in many cases against the law. Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch. A website isn't allowed to choose which VAT to charge and who they owe it to. In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images). There are many more examples like that and the applicable law is usually based on your phy…
> Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch.
That has nothing to with the choice of language. Unless you're using some antique HTTP server that doesn't support it, use Accept-Language.
If you have reasons for filtering content based on geographic location, and you absolutely can't trust the user to tell you, perhaps you shouldn't be serving content over HTTP; the IP address is a poor proxy for geographic location. It's perfectly posible to buy an IP block in one country, and have it routed to another.
> In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images).
If you're running your HTTP server in a Moslem[0] country, perhaps you shouldn't be serving those images to anyone. But if not, then it's your user's responsibility to comply with local law.
If the diversity of content that the internet brings is unacceptable to some nation, they can either try to do without the internet (good luck with that!), or try some kind of filtering regime like the Chinese have set up.
> the applicable law is usually based on your physical location at that point in time
"Your", i.e. the site user's location. But if you're geared-up to charge VAT in the first place, then you're able to handle things like delivery addresses in EU countries. At any rate, if your site visitor fails to pay VAT on purchases, it's the user that has committed VAT fraud, not the server operator. So operators should simply ask users where they are, for those purposes.
[0] Not all Moslems are Arabs, and not all Arabs are Moslems.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#218I 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…
I don't even care that much about the IP vs System Language part of it tbh, what REALLY pisses me off is that despite having configured my Google Account to only show me english results, it will serve me Portuguese search results just because I live in Brazil.
That is truly maddening
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#219This is currently affecting me. Google serves me results in Portuguese. The results are poor for me, because I can't read the language. The suggested websites are in Portuguese. And there's no way around this?
It's crazy!
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#220At least if you use Tor Browser, you will learn a few words in just about every language.