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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?

#321

Post by porknubbins »

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!

This was one disillusionment of finally becoming fluent in a foreign language. I had kind of assumed all major languages would have similarly sized, disjoint bodies of content worth reading but English dominates everything, especially if the info is of any practical use, and only for particular cultural issues do we need to read in another language.

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

#322

Post by ehPReth »

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…

Interesting! Thanks :)

One sad thing is localization for Canada is kind of broken for a lot of platforms it seems? For a lot of people that I help having their locale has Canada seems to usually base it off of United Kingdom stuff including setting paper size as A4(!)

Which… I wish we used but unfortunately we don’t - we use the US paper system. this causes problems with stricter printers and printing and also just manufacturing stuff like PDFs

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

#323

Post by tharkun__ »

FabHK wrote: post #319
tharkun__ wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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–...

Lol there goes that dream. No date format left for us.

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

#325

Post by verve_rat »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #284
verve_rat wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If needs be put a "Language Settings" header above it or something, but if you can read the rest of the page then those sentences are not for you!

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

#326

Post by Dylan16807 »

verve_rat wrote: post #325
Dylan16807 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If needs be put a "Language Settings" header above it or something, but if you can read the rest of the page then those sentences are not for you!

If you have an area like that, I feel like you don't need full sentences at all.

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

#328

Post by amaccuish »

porknubbins wrote: post #321
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!

This was one disillusionment of finally becoming fluent in a foreign language. I had kind of assumed all major languages would have similarly sized, disjoint bodies of content worth reading but English dominates everything, especially if the info is of any practical use, and only for particular cultural issues do we need to read in another language.

I think I was pretty lucky with the languages I chose. Whilst I find little good French content, the German and Russian webs are pretty well stocked.

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

#329

Post by chucke »

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…

Browser install wizards already configure the default chosen language to the OS language, which should already be the preferred language, so I'd be very surprised if that was the reason they never bothered to fix this behaviour.

My theory is that yes, they don't lose business because of this so why fix it, but mostly because the most valuable country-markets in the world tend to be monolingual, and the US is the most profitable of them all. And everyone uses Google despite of this because well, what else?

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