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

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

#301

Post by quantum_magpie »

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…

But they already have a solution for this. They have a domain with the local country TLD for people who want that language. Why do they keep fucking with people accessing the english domain?

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

#302

Post by delecti »

I recently noticed this while browsing their device store from Germany. I couldn't get to the US shop no matter what I tried changing. There's a language and locale query parameter in the URL, but it will forcibly redirect you back if you try to change it. I'm not sure what it's even there for.

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

#303

Post by quantum_magpie »

kichimi wrote: post #286
fsckboy wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely not. Tons of non-english languages say month first.

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

#304

Post by yodsanklai »

laurent92 wrote: post #278
scrollaway wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality, tech articles are dumbed down, tutorials in French lose nuance, and, well, good luck finding Hacker News in French. It was a revolution for me when I gained access to the English web, it’s the origin of the documents! I want results in English because the quality is higher in English!

>The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality

It depends. It is definitely the case for tech but not for everything. For philosophy, science, movie reviews, cooking, and of course anything related to French culture, there's a lot of high quality content.

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

#305

Post by thih9 »

kolinko wrote: post #271
scrollaway wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're logged into a Google account, you can change the language in settings. (I'm in Poland, and I force Google to be in english this way)

The original article mentions that, as well as some shortcomings of this method.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

mcv wrote: post #202
tuvan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google sheets also does this and even uses regional formatting standards. I can't copy values between programs because some are using ',' for decimals and some are using '.' its VERY annoying

Maybe we need a locale-neutral separator for these things. Then we'll have three conflicting options. I always get this wrong in calculators. I type , where I should have typed . or vice versa, and get a completely wrong result.

[deleted]

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

#307

Post by ouid »

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…

I mean, what's actually stupid here is that there isn't any way to configure this properly. It's wild that the default behavior is the only behavior. I'm not even sure I believe it.

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

#308

Post by drusepth »

onpensionsterm wrote: post #250
fsckboy wrote: post #235

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.

"The 4th of July" is the name of a holiday that happens on July 4th, a day after July 3rd and a day before July 5th.

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

#309

Post by makeitdouble »

Arnt wrote: post #150
makeitdouble wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After all, Google is famous for data collected and data-driven decisions. Remember that "41 shades of blue" story? Data (metrics really) isn’t the end all be all, and in particular the decisions resulting from the data is not bound to be good. As you say, Google is famous for data-driven decisions, and for instance android couldn’t become the top rated smartphone OS. Their shopping property couldn’t overcome compet…

At an individual level, we should IMNSHO moderate our hubris and at least consider the possibility that other people are right, and that includes people at Google. Data isn't bound to be good, but it's not bound to be bad either. Posting "why Google is wrong" is (still IMNSHO) an overdose of hubris, and because of that hubris it's wrong even if Google happens to be wrong in the matter at hand.

There’s a point that hasn’t been much raised in the other threads because of its obviousness: they’re the wildly dominant search engine, paying ungodly amounts of money to stay so, and forcing itself wherever it can (remember the lawsuits around the search bar in android…)

For them to decide some portion of users are not worth the hassle and should have a degraded experience, because overall it serves Google better (revenue ? engagement ?) doesn’t make them ‘right’ in my book. Feels more like ‘assholes’.

If your argument was that for a vast majority of user the current behavior might be better, so as a whole it is the “right” choice, this has a taste of trolley problem. Except there’s more than two paths here, and having settings that work properly would make everyone happy for instance. It’s not hubris to say that Google isn’t delivering on that part, making the overall situation “wrong”.

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

#310

Post by abeppu »

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…

But Google is a bit unusual in that they both produce a very popular browser and very popular sites. Even if we suppose they know it's the case internally that many people have their browsers set to English but nevertheless want results in their local language ... they're also the ones producing a browser which allows one to set the preferred language which they then disregard.
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