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

smaller.fish

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which country did you see that? I'm curious because that contradicts my experience.

My anecdotes are from two countries: 1. In Quebec, Canada where French speakers keep the default en-US, even thought most of their work and communications will be in fr-CA. 2. In Bulgaria, because most people learned computer concepts in English so seeing OS and Browser menus in Bulgarian would be confusing to them.

Thanks, I guess both cases make sense and in that case geolocation probably works better.

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

#223
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…

It's a setting that you can't change. You can't override it. You can't say "yes I'm really really really sure I want Google to always be in English."

It's beyond nuts. And "catering to the computer illiterate" can't be the explanation.

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

#224

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…

Trying to guess the user's language is ok as long as the user has some way to override your guess. DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change between your local language and English. That's great, because depending on the search you want, it may be better done on either language. The Microsoft site uses your language header on their .Net documentation. That is very bad because no matter what your browse…

> There is a language switcher that takes some 20 seconds to use

They've finally added back the "Read in English" button they removed years ago for some dumb reason when they migrated the .NET docs to a new domain.

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

#225

I built an iOS app once for a Dutch audience. We used the device's language as the app's language, because that makes sense, right? It's the same with the preferred language in a browser, right? Wrong; we got complaints from users that their app was in English instead of Dutch. Even though their device was set to English or another unsupported language. We begrudgingly added an app specific language preference. I rep…

It's frustrating that again and again I run into the same sort of root issue. There exists UI to configure something but it's either hard to find, hard to change, people want to leave that setting as-is but still want your webpage/app to behave differently, or people don't even know about it. What this leads to having to wrap "native"/"system" UI for almost any option that decent number of users might want.

Dark mode is another good example of this. A lot of app developers weren't able to just respect the system setting, instead they had to add a toggle/select to their options so users could pick "Follow system", "Always Light", or "Always Dark". Same thing with language and you never please everyone. If you add a website/app setting to change language there will be some number of users who complain that your app isn't following system settings (even if you set your own internal setting initially to match the system). You can normally satisfy most people with a "Follow System" or "Hardcode to X value" but it always feels a little gross to add yet another level of settings. In the same way you will almost never get a native Push Notification (or other permission) dialog in an app, first they pop their custom dialog and only if you say "Yes"/"Enable" will they pop the system one. I understand why and I've implemented this multiple times but it feels like there has to be a better middle ground between "You can only show the permission dialog once" and "You can spam it over and over indefinitely", I always hate having to create the "It looks like you've disabled this notification, here is how you can turn it on in your device settings"-screen.

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

#226

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…

I think this is the answer ('misconfigured' local machines). For mobile phones at least, my understanding is that many bilingual people will set their phone up as American English because they believe the phone experience will be better, but then search primarily in their native language (like Hindi for example). Having location trump the language settings here makes more sense- however it should be configurable for logged in users. If it's not that's madness.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My theory has always been that in any given country, there are far more native speakers with misconfigured computing environments than there are visitors and nomadic folks like me. But then why doesn't Google just make it easier to set that setting? Honestly, when I'm in another country, I don't get too upset that Google results are in another language, I just get upset that I can't seem to find a simple way to cha…

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.

Logging in doesn't solve it.

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

#228
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.

i just looked up, the "American" confusion: we got our date order from the English long ago. Then the English changed their date order. That must have been most confusing

And month/day is not as confusing as day/month (widely used in Europe) since it doesn't correspond to how we say dates.

moving the year first then using the American MM/DD is the least confusing way to do it

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

#229

My 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.

USA-centrism per se would still seem to recognise second languages, several state legislatures use Spanish, I think at least one publishes laws in Spanish & English.

Part of USA even has Spanish as an official and principal language - Puerto Rico.

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

#230
It seems like the obvious solution here is to have another language that semantically means "force English" which is only ever sent by the browser if the user explicitly selected English in OS or browser settings. That way, the ambiguity between "en-us" meaning "default" or meaning "us English" would go away. Maybe even setting Accept-Language to "en-us,en-us" could mean that?
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