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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?

#311

Post by mobilio »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #153
m_st wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Excel: Watch out with multi language setups! I was working with an English iPhone, an English Windows PC and a Swiss German Mac on an Excel file stored on One Drive. Editing sometimes in Excel and sometimes in Excel Online. Result: Broken data due to SUM/SUMME/etc formulas, broken phone number recognition and (worst) broken dates. What a mess!

And broken CSV files. In some European locales Excel switches from importing/exporting Comma Separated Values to Semicolon Separated Values with comma acting as the decimal point.

I'm also victim of this.

It can be fix if you do import from file and then manually select separator.

But this was need to be done every. single. time.

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

#312

Post by thayne »

> The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US

maybe browser should default to sending no value or a special "default" value for Accept-Language. So that sites can use location if it is the default, but if you explicitly configure your browser to use en-US, then it will respect that.

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

#314

Post by kichimi »

quantum_magpie wrote: post #303
kichimi wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're talking about English

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

#315

Post by tharkun__ »

yodsanklai wrote: post #304
laurent92 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disclaimer: Choosing to reply here for "reasons" but there's lots of siblings I could've chosen.

Reading comments so far and the article I think we're mixing up many different use cases and choices.

If I set my browser to English, that means I want the interface language to definitely be English. Do no serve me the interface in Japanese just because I'm in Japan. I won't even be able to find the "Change language here" dropdown ...

Now search results are a different thing. If I type something into www.google.com while being on US soil with en-us as my language setting that is in French, isn't it obvious that I might primarily be served French language content and that is what I want too? While the interface of Google is still in English? Or vice versa? If I type an English language query into www.google.fr while fr-fr is my language setting, I expect worldwide results in English, while my interface is still in French. Sure, restaurant name search results I might want sorted differently based on location and that's a good thing overall, but leave my interface language alone!

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

#316

Post by tharkun__ »

FabHK wrote: post #209
piyh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort. https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I totally prefer this date format too when I need to be clear and communicate internationally (which is most of the time).

Consider this though: It's not an inherently unambiguous and language agnostic format. It just so happens that there is no country that would write the above date as 2022-11-03. If there was, we'd have the same issue again.

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

#317

Post by lamontcg »

xenomachina wrote: post #233
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 worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US, so Google effectively treats an Accept-Language of en-US as a no-op, and then it falls through to location-based. (I don't agree with this rationale, and said as much, but there you have it.) Note that other values for Accept-Language are not ignored. I haven't tried it my…

And once a rationale like this has become part of company culture for >20 years, there is almost no way it is ever changing.

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

#318

Post by FabHK »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #282
onpensionsterm wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

It was a facetious way to refer to the USA, I believe. No other country, AFAIK, uses MM-DD-YYYY (except (former) US possessions).

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

#319

Post by FabHK »

tharkun__ wrote: post #316
FabHK wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort. https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I totally prefer this date format too when I need to be clear and communicate internationally (which is most of the time). Consider this though: It's not an inherently unambiguous and language agnostic format. It just so happens that there is no country that would write the above date as 2022-11-03. If there was, we'd have the same issue again.

Apparently there are... shudder.

> Gregorian, year–day–month (YDM) This date format is used in Kazakhstan, Latvia, Nepal, and Turkmenistan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Gregorian,_year–...

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

#320

Post by rapjr9 »

My guess is that large companies may be required to switch to the geolocated national language preferences of a countries government so that a nation preserves its identity. If you are in the USA and you can switch your language preference to the UK your mindset starts to trend towards UK thinking. Region locks on DVD's and Blu-Ray disks may have a similar purpose, to preserve local culture. This seems both good and bad, bad in that it discourages cross-cultural exposure and thinking, and good in that it makes the world richer because cultural diversity encourages many different approaches to life which may benefit everyone whenever cultures do mix, sort of a redundancy of operating systems so to speak.
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