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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?

#231

Post by kps »

ascar wrote: post #130
justinmayer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly disagree with all of the above. If a site absolutely needs to know where I am in that moment, they can ask me, and I will decide where I am for the purposes of that particular site. To pick one of a myriad of examples, I often buy software, books, etc. via the web. I don't need sites to assume I want to pay in Euro just because my IP address in that moment happens to be associated with a European IP address…

Well, your example will be in many cases against the law. Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch. A website isn't allowed to choose which VAT to charge and who they owe it to. In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images). There are many more examples like that and the applicable law is usually based on your phy…

My ISP covers two jurisdictions with different primary languages. IP geolocation often places me in the wrong one.

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

#233

Post by xenomachina »

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 worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US, so Google effectively treats an Accept-Language of en-US as a no-op, and then it falls through to location-based. (I don't agree with this rationale, and said as much, but there you have it.)

Note that other values for Accept-Language are not ignored. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard some people say that setting their language to en-GB or en-CA works well.

You can also use &hl=en-US, which always takes precedence.

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

#234

Post by S0und »

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…

This is why I think Google assistant is absolutely useless. Try to call someone who has a name in X language on a device that is set to English. You just can't. I love Big tech circle jerk about diversity, that somehow stops at skincolor, gender and sexual identity. You happens to bilingual? Sorry our cutting edge AI can't handle that.

Google all I want is a command for assistant, for example "OK Google, Call *in german/dutch/French/etc* . See, it's not that hard.

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

#235

Post by fsckboy »

FabHK wrote: post #209
piyh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.

2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort. https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

i use 2022-03mar-11 or 202203mar11

it most importantly sorts properly when used at the front of a filename, and it's surprisingly easy to read; and in context I'm mostly looking at the month-date which can be picked off the end, "march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway

time of day can be appended without messing with the collation (usually i put a space)

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

#236

Post by currysausage »

emptyparadise wrote: post #8
minusf wrote: post #2

firefox had localized installers that also set the accept language headers correctly, dont know about chrome. using the geolocation data is good for the majority of the users i guess, although it ignores a lot of nuance about mixed populations. back then when i was still a google product, it was very very frustrating while backpacking around the world. `hl=en` or some such parameter was the "fix".

google.com/ncr (no country redirect) was the panacea until Google broke it.

Nowadays it's https://www.google.com/?gl=us&hl=en (US region, English language). Works for /maps too.

If that still redirects you to a local version for some reason, append &gws_rd=cr (which AFAIK tells Google Web Server that a country redirect already happened and that no further country redirect should be triggered).

Youtube needs uppercase region and usually disrespects language if you don't append &persist_hl=1 (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/?hl=en&gl=US&persist_hl=1). Might as well append &persist_gl=1 too.

Not really an issue if you use bookmarks on your own devices, but super annoying otherwise.

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

#237

Post by netsharc »

unreal37 wrote: post #223
wutbrodo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has literally billions of users. There are people who are worse at using computers than anyone you've ever met. I'm as irritated as anyone when something doesn't cater to "power users". But if we're trying to understand the reason behind the decision instead of just venting, then it's instructive to consider just how computer-illiterate the non-power-user is for a product as massive as Google Search, and how a…

It's a setting that you can't change. You can't override it. You can't say "yes I'm really really really sure I want Google to always be in English." It's beyond nuts. And "catering to the computer illiterate" can't be the explanation.

At least for google.com, you can use google.com/ncr to get it[1] in English (just tested in incognito mode from a non-English location).

[1] it = the front page. No guarantees that it'll work for other parts or other Google sites like Google Maps[2]. I remember noticing years ago that even with the /ncr, when the front page had a doodle, mousing over it still showed the tooltip in the local language. Billions of dollars, and can't even program a website.

[2] Yeah it still gives me my local currency for hotels in Google Maps. I live in country A, I was visiting country B, and I needed to find a hotel in my home country A. I was logged in. Google knows my address and that my account is tied to Country A (because... Play Store region locking for content, blah blah), but it still showed me the hotel prices for the country I live in and was looking for hotels in, in the foreign currency of the place I was currently sitting at. Fuck you very much, Google!

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

#238

Post by netsharc »

HALtheWise wrote: post #230

It seems like the obvious solution here is to have another language that semantically means "force English" which is only ever sent by the browser if the user explicitly selected English in OS or browser settings. That way, the ambiguity between "en-us" meaning "default" or meaning "us English" would go away. Maybe even setting Accept-Language to "en-us,en-us" could mean that?

Google makes the (sadly) dominant web browser. Why not just add a feature on the browser to have a huge popup (I'm kidding, it should be more subtle) at the next upgrade to ask the user "What languages do you prefer for content?".

Currently, I'm guessing the browser copies the language of the OS at first run, and the option to change it is behind the sign that says "Beware of the leopard"

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

#239

Post by Foobar8568 »

scrollaway wrote: post #199
Symbiote wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium? > Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-e…

Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city / area. I speak French. And I don’t want results in French, I want results in English. Google thinks they known better - they do not.

It's not just Google, all of them, Switzerland /German by default including the information to switch language every where
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