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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.
Ignorance, or arrogance?
It doesn’t care that:
- my browser is in English
- that I’m logged in and with English as my language
- that my region is set to the U.S.
- that I only used English keywords on the search box
It still gives me Portuguese results as my geo ip is in Brazil.
It’s infuriating.
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.
As a brit, I am always irked that most of what I browse is locked to US English, as if it's the same thing as British English. At least if your main language is a popular non-English language you get the option to switch to it.
This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where United States is always in the special top slot, and below that is everywhere else on the planet, like second rate-citizens. It's especially egregious on global sites, that serve global content.
This is especially annoying for Portuguese people. Because most Portuguese speakers are Brazilian, sometimes websites default to Brazilian pages or trends. Twitter is becoming almost unusable with their suggested topics - I know they're awful for most people, but for me they don't even get the country right...
Not to mention as you said many sites such as Twitter think I care about what happens in South America because I speak the same language.
Nice work, world's best and brightest.
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 decisions. Remember that "41 shades of blue" story?