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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?

#331

Post by ascar »

denton-scratch wrote: post #217
ascar wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, your example will be in many cases against the law. Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch. A website isn't allowed to choose which VAT to charge and who they owe it to. In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images). There are many more examples like that and the applicable law is usually based on your phy…

> Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch. That has nothing to with the choice of language. Unless you're using some antique HTTP server that doesn't support it, use Accept-Language. If you have reasons for filtering content based on geographic location, and you absolutely can't trust the user to tell you, perhaps you shouldn't be serving content over HTTP; the IP address is a…

> That has nothing to with the choice of language

That is exactly my point. Localization isn't about choice of language and thus the choice of words of GP was wrong. He was talking about language, translation or internationalization. Localization is about adapting your website to a different local target market. The whole premise is of course that the company wants to do business in that area and then they have to follow the local law.

My comment was a response to the GP stating he wants it to be the users choice to set their location, but a company doing business in different countries can't just allow the user to choose with which entity it wants to interact through their website (Netflix being a prime example).

I explicitly said Arabic and "might" as I only know it's a problem in some countries in that geographic region, which is probably due to religious reasons, but I explicitly didn't want to bind it to religion. The biggest Muslim country is afaik Indonesia and they are not nearly as strict in these regards except for maybe the Aceh region.

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

#332

Post by petepete »

tzot wrote: post #155
petepete wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just so many things at play it's really difficult to know what to blame. When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice. When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support. So I just don't use Assistant for anything.

> When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice. > When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support. Maybe Google's own analytics suggest that very few people in Manchester use Bluetooth gadgets, ergo you are in Liverpool. Or (more seriously even if as unlikely perhaps) m…

I actually have two pairs of bluetooth headphones, my Sony XM3s (where this has happened for a year) and some brand new Sony Linkbuds.

Both exhibit the behaviour. Everything seems to work fine _except_ it thinks I'm elsewhere.

I don't know why the MAC address would come into play, I thought that Assistant was running on the phone via the headset. It just doesn't make sense to me that the phone immediately shows my proper location in Maps and Assistant responds correctly there, but not via Bluetooth.

Bluetooth being enabled doesn't affect the response on the phone itself, it only mis-reports the location when asking through the headsets.

Perhaps it's a permissions thing somewhere but I've looked through the settings and everything looks fine. I've searched and other people are suffering from it too. Thankfully I'm not alone, but Google's support is terrible.

https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/107064163/google... https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/118603801/assis...

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

#333

Post by kuschku »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #281
kuschku wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The CSV "standard" is from 2005. Using ; as separator was common in germanic countries for decades before the standard was even written (and CSV was commonly understood as character separated values there).

You can’t easily redefine an existing standard just because you don’t like what everyone else has been doing for the past few decades.

As said, use TSV, which has been standardized for much longer, if you want compatibility.

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

#334

Post by jannes »

withinboredom wrote: post #247
xenomachina wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

en-NL worked perfectly, thanks for this tip!

This will make your browser very fingerprintable because it’s very uncommon.

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

#335

Post by withinboredom »

jannes wrote: post #334
withinboredom wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

en-NL worked perfectly, thanks for this tip!

This will make your browser very fingerprintable because it’s very uncommon.

I have an extension to override the locale per-site.

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

#336

Post by onpensionsterm »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #293
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. In the UK, for example, 2/2 is "the second of February", not "February second".

I understand the point entirely. I said I agree with it. But at the same time, "Fourth of July" should not be used to infer anything about how Americans say dates. It doesn't help prove that both orders are used for dates. In the real world, some people say day-month and some say month-day, and the holiday is called "Fourth of July". In a counterfactual world where everyone switched to month-day, the holiday would st…

I'm not saying Americans say dates like that, I'm saying it's a reason they might consider that other people, or Americans once-upon-a-time, say dates like that.

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

#337

Post by onpensionsterm »

drusepth wrote: post #308
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.

"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.

Or on the 4th of July, to me.

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

#338

Post by account42 »

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…

> native speakers with misconfigured computing environments

How many of those are "misconfigured" and how many are set to en-US because that's the language they want for their computer.

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

#339

Post by account42 »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #246
liotier wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French native speaker here. UX consistency, shared Internet culture, habits from the early 90's and error messages I can actually find on the Web are the reasons why I always set my computing to the english language. I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that. On the French-language mandatory corporate Windows laptop, Excel formulas are translated in…

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.

I just use en_DK which (while not perfectly named) is exactly there to solve this.

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

#340

Post by account42 »

netsharc wrote: post #244
LamboJ wrote: post #36

I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.

I wonder if they could just change the browser to hint about "Do you want content in your local language?". I wonder if the dominant browser vendor on the web would be willing to accommodate Google...

The could even work together with the dominant smartphone OS maker to solve it there as well.
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