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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?

#171

Post by Semaphor »

i80and wrote: post #163
justinmayer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's answer to this problem is, "Just log in! Then we will always know what language you prefer." So Google doesn't make it easier to change that setting because they want you to be logged in all the time so they can track you better.

I had a fascinating issue with Google. I am a monolingual English speaker. I visited Iceland, and as happens, Google started serving UIs in Icelandic even while I was logged in. What was interesting was this continued for weeks after returning to my home country. There was no setting I could find to go back to English; I got good at the specific Icelandic keywords I needed to navigate the UI. Then without any ceremon…

Back in the mid-2000s, I remember there being 3 different language settings in your Google account, the one on the security page completely ignoring whatever language settings you had and always using geo-ip instead. And I couldn’t even figure out why there were 3 different settings for language.

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

#172

Post by Semaphor »

RF_Savage wrote: post #93
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…

At least it's not as bad as Aliexpress. They have randomly served me the page in Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Portugese, Thai, German and Romanian. The only good thing is that the menu to change back to english is less hidden nowdays. Yet to see it in my native Finnish. And all these without a VPN and from a domestic consumer ISP connection.

Aliexpress also doesn’t allow me to use my normal email, I think they have a whitelist of known email provider domains or something like that. It’s a pretty atrocious website all around.

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

#173

Post by oblio »

RF_Savage wrote: post #93
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…

At least it's not as bad as Aliexpress. They have randomly served me the page in Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Portugese, Thai, German and Romanian. The only good thing is that the menu to change back to english is less hidden nowdays. Yet to see it in my native Finnish. And all these without a VPN and from a domestic consumer ISP connection.

> Romanian

They figured out that "la naiba" is better than "perkele" :-p

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

#174

Post by tonfa »

andromeduck wrote: post #38
_Anima_ wrote: post #18

I live in the French speaking part of Belgium and have configured all my devices in English for the past 15+ years. Apparently Google consider that if you are geo IP located in Belgium with your devices in English, you _have to be_ a Dutch speaker. While I would agree that French speaking Belgians are in majority using French UIs, there are exceptions. Please respect my browser settings! The solution? I have to put F…

How did you even figure that one out?

I think they discovered the trick. Default headers might be ignored, but anything non default (e.g. en-gb, two languages, etc.) is assumed to be correct.

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

#175

Post by thedougd »

Similarly, why do I encounter phone apps that ask me if I want F or C temps, 24 hour or 12 hour, and date formats? Use the locale, at least as a default. I do get the scenario where I may want to work in another set of units than my locale, but I find the locale is frequently just ignored by these apps.

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

#176

Post by tonfa »

Fiahil wrote: post #89
andromeduck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you even figure that one out?

I live in France, speak French, but work with English as my primary language. So, I had to make the same settings change, otherwise google would keep putting French searches before English ones (despite the fact that I searched with English keywords). I don't remember how I found this, but it might something along the lines of "I'm really annoyed today, let's fix this NOW". When you speak 2 languages or more, and the…

> I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more than one language.

Funny, if anything probably 80%+ of the eng folks in Europe for big tech speak more than one language (everyone who's not from UK or Ireland).

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

#177

Post by sokz »

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…

I have faced the problem in steroids in India, where there are 22 scheduled languages. While I can read 3 local languages, one cannot be expected to know every single language in the general area. Keeping my computers in English doesn't help, changing the languages to the one that I can actually read doesn't help. It is sad that Google has harvested enough data about me to make a highly accurate profile of mine but can't be arsed to make usage of their products a little convenient for me by just respecting my language settings.

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

#178

Post by catchclose8919 »

RF_Savage wrote: post #93
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…

At least it's not as bad as Aliexpress. They have randomly served me the page in Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Portugese, Thai, German and Romanian. The only good thing is that the menu to change back to english is less hidden nowdays. Yet to see it in my native Finnish. And all these without a VPN and from a domestic consumer ISP connection.

I thought Aliexpress was just trying to subtly say "FU, we're the new dominant culture now" to western Europeans by randomly switching to Chinese like 25% of the time...

Guess they just have one of the buggiest locale detections in the world :)))

EDIT+: ...or maybe too many Chinese users leave their proxy/VPN on when using their site too

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

#179

Post by nyuszika7h »

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…

Indeed, I once read a story that said there are a lot of misconfigured computers specifically in Japan, so that's why they ignore `Accept-Language` if it's set to English. But yes, this is incredibly frustrating for power users like me who are fluent in English and prefer not to deal with half-baked translations.

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

#180

Post by [deleted] »

logifail wrote: post #133
zarzavat wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we are complaining about this, can we all agree that using plain for country is an anti pattern. There should be a fuzzy search. So many times I have to search for my country under United Kingdom UK Britain Great Britain England Only to find that it was “Great Britain” but collated in the B’s amongst Bhutan and Belgium, etc.

> So many times I have to search for my country under [...] It's even better when you have to explain this specific oddity in a foreign language. Try politely explaining to a German consular official that they probably need to look in their system's drop-down box under 'V' for 'Vereinigtes* Königreich' [UK] (instead of 'E' for 'England' or indeed 'G' for 'Großbritannien' [GB]) as they are attempting to enter passport…

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