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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?

#141

Post by lultimouomo »

jakub_g wrote: post #4

The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization ! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc.…

> language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization!

Maybe this is due to the fact that Excel documents break if you change language, as function names are localized?

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

#142

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Trying to guess the user's language is ok as long as the user has some way to override your guess.

DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change between your local language and English. That's great, because depending on the search you want, it may be better done on either language.

The Microsoft site uses your language header on their .Net documentation. That is very bad because no matter what your browser says you prefer, the only document with any reasonable quality is the English one. There is a language switcher that takes some 20 seconds to use (hurrah, javascript!) and they don't bother to save for your next access. That makes the site barely usable instead of completely useless.

What I don't get is, with the amount of information Google makes sure to collect about me, how does it not know that I prefer results not on my main language and verbatim search terms? That is even after I tell them that on their settings.

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

#143

Post by kevincox »

metafunctor wrote: post #12

My vote goes to the “Org Too Big, Nobody Cares” explanation. Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world with multiple official languages. Haven't checked this recently, but a while ago Google Maps was still serving street names in a random language (the first name in alphabetical ordering), for streets which have names in multiple languages.

I doubt it. I bet this actually works better for most people. It really sucks because you can't fix it if your computer is actually configured correct, but they probably ran some simple tests and determined that IP location is better than HTTP header language.

I'm sure it is easy to construct an argument that this isn't actually better overall. That case probably does then fall into "Org Too Big, Nobody Cares".

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

#144

Post by mkishi »

silvestrov wrote: post #84
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…

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…

That's okay, but when I go out of my way to actively set the language in a service's settings, shouldn't that be honored over an assumed local-by-default? Because that's what I do with Google (individually on Search and YouTube), and it somehow forgets it quite frequently.

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

#146

Post by ivansavz »

nicolas_t wrote: post #80
ivansavz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's exactly my experience. Most people who install windows don't bother to set the locale correctly, so everyone ends up en-US. So if you trust the Accept Language header, you'll get it wrong.

In which country did you see that? I'm curious because that contradicts my experience.

My anecdotes are from two countries:

1. In Quebec, Canada where French speakers keep the default en-US, even thought most of their work and communications will be in fr-CA.

2. In Bulgaria, because most people learned computer concepts in English so seeing OS and Browser menus in Bulgarian would be confusing to them.

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

#147

Post by marcosdumay »

metafunctor wrote: post #12

My vote goes to the “Org Too Big, Nobody Cares” explanation. Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world with multiple official languages. Haven't checked this recently, but a while ago Google Maps was still serving street names in a random language (the first name in alphabetical ordering), for streets which have names in multiple languages.

Monopolists don't care about quality.

It's slightly different from too big an organization. Big organizations do not care about the people they touch (employees, suppliers, etc). Monopolists do not care about their customers.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

darkerside wrote: post #135
criddell wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is built entirely upon the idea that they know their users and can therefore serve effective advertisements to them. The idea that they don't know what language their user wants seems absurd.

The fact that they don't know what every single new visitor to their site wants before they even get there is absurd?

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by littlecranky67 »

mcv wrote: post #137
silvestrov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…

> These users will still want Google to return results in their native language. Says who? This is a baseless assumption. Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for. And the browser should ask the OS or the user for their language preference. And if IT-support wants one language for the interface in order to facilitate support, they can still set the other language for…

> Says who?

The browser setting that every browser sends to any server it requests data from. Usually this defaults to the system language, but you can add more languages with a priority. Mine is English (prio 1), German (prio 2), yet I for some reason get tons of spanish content as I am going back and fourth between countries these days just based on Geolocation.

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

#150

Post by Arnt »

makeitdouble wrote: post #63
Arnt wrote: post #30

This doesn't even consider the possibility that location might be a more accurate indication of what language(s) the human user knows/prefers language than the browser setting is. Which it may or may not be. But I'm shocked by the headline, "Why does Google get internationalization wrong?" that just presume that Google hasn't collected data on this. After all, Google is famous for data collected and data-driven decis…

> After all, Google is famous for data collected and data-driven decisions. Remember that "41 shades of blue" story? Data (metrics really) isn’t the end all be all, and in particular the decisions resulting from the data is not bound to be good. As you say, Google is famous for data-driven decisions, and for instance android couldn’t become the top rated smartphone OS. Their shopping property couldn’t overcome compet…

At an individual level, we should IMNSHO moderate our hubris and at least consider the possibility that other people are right, and that includes people at Google. Data isn't bound to be good, but it's not bound to be bad either.

Posting "why Google is wrong" is (still IMNSHO) an overdose of hubris, and because of that hubris it's wrong even if Google happens to be wrong in the matter at hand.

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