I'm Catalan. I configured everything in Catalan. My personal computer OS is in Catalan, the browser is in Catalan, asking for Catalan as preferred language and English otherwise, and many many many websites as well as desktop applications keep thinking I'll be happy reading Spanish. No Catalan, no English. Spanish. And there is no way to help it.
I'm Not Japanese
31–40 of 129 posts
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#32>> Does Google assumes that we live in The Matrix, and you can learn a new country’s language instantly as soon as you move there? >> Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese (true preference: "Accept-Language: ja-jp;q=1.0; en;q=0.000001") whose configura…
I am logged on to Google, and they know I want English results and an English interface, because I've gone through and done all the settings. And yet, occasionally something goes wonky and they start showing me the interface in Italian again. I have no problems if their default is the local language - that's pretty much a no-brainer - but when I've told them in no uncertain terms what my own preferences are, they oug…
For me sometimes it switches to Arabic even if I set the settings. And here in north Africa most people are francophone and prefer French or English !
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#33Rdio, for one, is restricted by its licensing agreements with the record labels.
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#34This kind of thing pisses me off regularly. Google is one of the worst offenders, completely ignoring browser language preferences.
But American websites in general are awful at this. They completely ignore local diversity and sensitivities and simply assume "one country, one language", so they will for instance happily present Flemish users with French interfaces.
It's fucking offensive. If I type google.com instead of google.nl or google.de or google.co.jp and my browser preferred language is English, I have made it pretty damn clear what I want.
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#35google.com/intl/en/
there you go.
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#36>> Does Google assumes that we live in The Matrix, and you can learn a new country’s language instantly as soon as you move there? >> Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese (true preference: "Accept-Language: ja-jp;q=1.0; en;q=0.000001") whose configura…
> Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese
Google is making the (completely wrong) assumption that those people cannot type google.co.jp instead of google.com and make their own choices.
But at least in Japan they're probably right about the language. Google pulls the same crap in multilingual countries, and gets it wrong a lot of the time. This isn't Google being smart, this is Google being lazy and insensitive.
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#37The fix:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pws=0&safe=off&#...
You should be able to configure your search engine pref (at least in Firefox and Chrome) to reflect this.
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#38I have experienced the same annoying redirects, even when I correct it - they again redirect to a geo search site. This has been happening less for some reason. Also I use DuckDuckGo a lot more and don't have that problem.
YouTube is even worse. It has all sorts of data on what I view and like... Yet if I travel it acts as though my preferences have drastically changed. This just seems extremely lame. It is the oposite of "organizing the world's information" sensibly. The only way to see non-hyper local completely unwanted videos is a vpn.
The biggest complaint I have is how windows 3.1 like the whole experience is. Let me make my settings and have those stick. Don't hide preferences in some crazy gui (windows style) and make it some hard to retain your preferences. If they want the default behavior to be that search results have little to do with the person and most to do with the geo location Google thinks you are at fine. Just make it obvious what you are doing (showing me massively manipulated results based on location - and tell me what location you think that is). And let me have a simple way to set my preferences to search based on USA location (or if there is some legal reason this can't be done just tell me so I don't wonder why the results are so crazy).
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#39This isn't isolated to google, bing is far worse because it's difficult to switch languages. Then there are a gazillion company product support sites which also default the language for you, particularly tricky when you are looking for a specific driver update.
Re: I'm Not Japanese
#40>> Does Google assumes that we live in The Matrix, and you can learn a new country’s language instantly as soon as you move there? >> Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese (true preference: "Accept-Language: ja-jp;q=1.0; en;q=0.000001") whose configura…
> This is a hack around censorship laws in a few places (most relevantly to the instant case, Germany, I believe). Google has a blogspot.jp which is a copy of .com which is a copy of .de which is a copy of... except that they enforce country-specific censorship laws. This was deemed an acceptable tradeoff versus getting all of blogspot blacklisted in e.g. Germany. what event/law are you referring to? why blogspot sho…
I have noticed this in referral logs. They do it for tons of countries (I would guess all based on how many I see). Does Google automatically remerge all that to treat it as one domain for pagerank (so links to those separate domains are just treated as if they linked to the .com page), duplicate content, etc.?