Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings? • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by account42 » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 11:07 AM UTC

lokar wrote: post #200

The reason is straight forward. They have data that shows most people outside the US have the setting wrong. For the .com (American!) domain the default is English. For each country specific site the default is the primary local language. You can change the default via a cookie.

> For the .com (American!) domain the default is English.

If only. The geolocation talked about here is taking place on the .com domain. Worse, even if you manage to switch it to english (they have been hiding that link more and more) it will still use geolocation to push search results in the "local" language.

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

#342

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #339

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #246

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.

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

That doesn't have `_` as the thousands separator. It uses ISO 8601 for date/times instead of RFC 3339 (so "2022-03-14T15:06:03 EDT" instead of "2022-03-14 15:06:03-04:00"), etc.

I just happen to want slightly different choices than it allows.

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

#343

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

onpensionsterm wrote: post #336

Dylan16807 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm saying it's a reason they might consider that other people, or Americans once-upon-a-time, say dates like that.

Once upon a time yes.

So that makes it sort of a reason to think those are still possible, but equally validly it acts as a reason to say nobody does that anymore.

So overall it's entirely reasonable to ignore such ambivalent evidence/"evidence".