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

smaller.fish

281–290 of 343 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable or other shenanigans.

In Germanic countries, it’s common to write numbers like 1.234,56 instead of the anglo standard of 1,234.56. Not just on paper, but also digitally. So a value in excel or a CSV is now 1234,56 instead of 1234.56. As result, CSV needs to use ; instead of , as separator Which is why TSV exists, because the tab character is universal.

I don't really care about what kind of punctuation Germanic countries are using, which I am not using, avoiding ambiguity in the first place.

My software, including my browser, and my operating system is usually set to English, and I expect spreadsheet (data!) applications to not interpret whatever they want (based on IP address or location of companies or whatever), but actually interpret according to a standard. It is ridiculous for a spreadsheet application reading CSV (C! as in Comma!) to interpret the comma as a visual number decoration, instead of according to format, as a separator of cells.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i use 2022-03mar-11 or 202203mar11 it most importantly sorts properly when used at the front of a filename, and it's surprisingly easy to read; and in context I'm mostly looking at the month-date which can be picked off the end, "march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway time of day can be appended without messing with the collation (usually i put a space)

>"march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway I think every time this topic comes up I come across someone with this misconception - usually from a country that celebrates the 4th of July.

So I agree with your point that the way dates are said varies. But your example isn't very good. That's just the name of the holiday, and should not be used to infer anything else.

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

#283
post #18

I live in the French speaking part of Belgium and have configured all my devices in English for the past 15+ years. Apparently Google consider that if you are geo IP located in Belgium with your devices in English, you _have to be_ a Dutch speaker. While I would agree that French speaking Belgians are in majority using French UIs, there are exceptions. Please respect my browser settings! The solution? I have to put F…

I wonder if you could also use en_GB with the same effect (though if your hack is working it's probably not worth changing).

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mi…

The whole sentence "This page in English" or "This page in Mandarin" should be in English or Mandrin respectively. Compare "Rirgwyd rkrgru dlwhgi ro English" to "This page in English". Which is better for people that only read English?

They're pretty close.

And when a page is in the correct language, I would prefer not to have entire sentences in a different language.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is built entirely upon the idea that they know their users and can therefore serve effective advertisements to them. The idea that they don't know what language their user wants seems absurd.

The fact that they don't know what every single new visitor to their site wants before they even get there is absurd?

[deleted]

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

#286
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

July 2nd

July 3rd

4th of July

July 5th ...

Also my experience is that only Americans say the month first. Today is the 11th of March.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least for google.com, you can use google.com/ncr to get it[1] in English (just tested in incognito mode from a non-English location). [1] it = the front page. No guarantees that it'll work for other parts or other Google sites like Google Maps[2]. I remember noticing years ago that even with the /ncr, when the front page had a doodle, mousing over it still showed the tooltip in the local language. Billions of doll…

you can use google.com/ncr to get it[1] in English

I just tried, and while the page is in English, the top search results it returned are localized results to the country I happen to live in.

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

#288
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

While I used this example, which one could explain as intentional for various reasons. There are myriad other examples where there are dual languages being interwoven across google properties. Including minutia in one language, but the body content in another. Facebook/Meta's properties are the worst for this however and will intermingle languages frequently despite being an account-based service (literally ignoring the user's preferences in favour of IP-based guess work.)

Back to Google - Algorithmically there are likely straightforward reasons for why this is happening. Clearly the contents of the pages are composed from a mixture of sources, for reasons unknown these sources may not be able to detect or receive the localisation settings of the end user. Recent changes to privacy protections and cookie limitations may also be a contributor to these issues. Including the obvious: getting ads in the wrong language.

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

#289

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 just hate that google makes me more ignorant that I want to be. I speak multiple languages. Nothing fancy, just related ones. I want google to search in all the languages I use and know, and not arbitrarily filter my internet into a location-specific bubble.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just have a custom locale for any UNIX-like systems I use. American English, UTF-8, 24-hour time, RFC-3339 dates, SI units, '.' decimal point, '_' thousands separator. I call it en_ENG, for the fictional land of Engineeristan.

Mind to share your LC_ settings?

An explanation of all the valid fields can be found at [1]. Copy an existing locale, modify it to suit your needs. Don't forget to escape all characters as Unicode if you want it to support unicode. Compile & install as normal with localedef, add to `/var/lib/locales/supported.d`, run locale-gen, set the various `LC_` variables you want to use in `~/.profile` or `/etc/envionment` or whatever.

This[2] askubuntu answer goes into more detail.

[1] https://lh.2xlibre.net/locale/en_US/ [2] https://askubuntu.com/a/162714

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