Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm Not Japanese

sachagreif.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 129 posts

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#41

Post by cocojumbo123 »

davidw wrote: post #21
patio11 wrote: post #3

>> 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…

Same here. I travel a lot and use VPN to access the corporate network. So if I am in the Chinese office google goes Chinese (and it takes some random guessing to switch the language back to English) then in the hotel (via VPN) it promptly goes German.

One small improvement would be to write the name of the language in the original and not in whatever country's version. (e.g. English instead of Angol, etc).

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#42

Post by jgeralnik »

zalew wrote: post #29
patio11 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has many laws which are different that e.g. the USA. In particular, in the US certain sentiments which are politically and socially radioactive are protected by the US Constitution and the laws, traditions, and expectations of the American polity. Germany is similar in some regards but there is one particular politically and socially radioactive statement you could make -- support for the Nazi Party -- which,…

I know Germany and many other countries in Europe are more sensitive about promoting extreme viewpoints. My question was more about something specific related to censoring blogspot, and how the domain redirects are used to bypass that. I mean, how does it matter what domain is used to display the same content? OP says he's redirected to blogspot.jp - what problems does it solve for Google?

Presumably articles that need to be censored in Germany would be censored on blogspot.de and not on blogspot.com, so Germans are redirected.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#43

Post by pom »

And amazingly, going to Google Maps still defaults to a map of the US... (edit: when you go to maps.google.com)

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#44

Post by alkimie »

Use Google No Country Redirect.

I struggled with this at length both for my computers and those of my children until I found the obscure google switch:

google.com/ncr

That tells google not to attempt to redirect to local language. You will have to set this in your search preferences as the google search URL.

Hope this helps,

John

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#46

Post by smcl »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #26
zalew wrote: post #2

and the worst part is, it can be solved with a simple tiny link/dropdown 'language' in the header or footer, it's not rocket science.

...unless the language menu is itself localized. This happens so often its not funny. Even finding the language menu is hard, since its title often localized also.

This bugs the hell out of me, what is wrong with little flag + two letter code to indicate the current language, and maybe a little arrow to indicate that it is a menu you can select from.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#47

Post by xiaoma »

I hate this trend, too. I've always felt that if I go to the .com, then it should offer English by default. If I go to google.co.jp, then you can show me Japanese. Living in Taiwan, I did slowly get used to the traditional Chinese character web. But there's no way I want to or even can go through that every time I take a week-long trip somewhere.

Respect the language settings of my browser, or even my machine as a reasonable default and the world is a better place!

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#48

Post by DanBC »

zalew wrote: post #29
patio11 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has many laws which are different that e.g. the USA. In particular, in the US certain sentiments which are politically and socially radioactive are protected by the US Constitution and the laws, traditions, and expectations of the American polity. Germany is similar in some regards but there is one particular politically and socially radioactive statement you could make -- support for the Nazi Party -- which,…

I know Germany and many other countries in Europe are more sensitive about promoting extreme viewpoints. My question was more about something specific related to censoring blogspot, and how the domain redirects are used to bypass that. I mean, how does it matter what domain is used to display the same content? OP says he's redirected to blogspot.jp - what problems does it solve for Google?

> * how does it matter what domain is used to display the same content?*

It only displays the same content if that content is compliant for the local region.

Thus, in the Nazi example, all off blogspot get the posts except blogspot.de, who filter it out somehow.

That's something that Youtube doesn't do with adverts very well - I'm in the UK, I've not left the UK, my IP geolocates to the UK, but I often get US ads in Youtube. Advertising law is different and often the ads are not compliant for the UK.

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#49

Post by [deleted] »

aristidb wrote: post #12
MarkSweep wrote: post #5

If you are traveling and Google is trying to send you to a country specific site, you can use this address to tell Google you actually really want to go to Google.com: http://www.google.com/ncr I believe the NCR stands for No Country Redirect. But as the article points out, many websites make it harder than it aught to be use them from other countries. Some Japenese websites sometimes even actively try to prevent for…

At least for me, that does not work anymore. However, http://www.google.com/?hl=en works.

[deleted]

Re: I'm Not Japanese

#50

Post by ktizo »

rickmb wrote: post #36
patio11 wrote: post #3

>> 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. Goo…

It asked her if she wanted Japanese and she clicked yes and it gave her Japanese. What crap do you think anyone is pulling here?

Also, if in Japan, I would be surprised to find google.com not to be in Japanese, and I would expect to have to perhaps make some kind of preparations for the fact that the majority of the world does not speak my language and that my electronic devices and services are not universal metatrons run by omnipresent deitys either.

Post reply on HN