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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?

#251

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

…but chances are you are logged into Gmail which should know better… its just embarrassing honestly.

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

#252

Post by toast0 »

scbrg wrote: post #161
Arnt wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are - objectively - wrong. There's a spec, and they're violating it. This gets even more absurd given that they most likely produce the user agent as well, so they can't really blame "it's too hard for users to configure the user agent". Put the effin' language selector in the toolbar if configured language doesn't match your wildly inaccurate guesses then.

> They are - objectively - wrong. There's a spec, and they're violating it.

Not following a spec only implies they're objectively wrong if the spec is objectively correct. I don't think the Accept-Language spec is objectively correct; for me, it's not even subjectively correct. Following it or not is a choice, and neither is wrong.

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

#253

Post by ggregoire »

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #22

My personal papercut is with YouTube. 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.

Same with Google Images. All the results are from local sources although I have selected Language: English and Region: United States in the settings. This is indeed infuriating.

By the way, I just went to https://www.google.com/preferences and the page is totally broken (Google Chrome with disabled ublock/privacybadger), when I click on Languages or Appearance or Region: Show more (at the bottom), nothing happens. "Uncaught ReferenceError: google is not defined" in the console.

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

#254

Post by justinmayer »

xenomachina wrote: post #233
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 my…

Thank you for effectively confirming what I long suspected. Much appreciated.

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

#256

Post by bjoli »

And why can't I disable CCs on youtube for any foreign language.

Google already knows what languages I speak, yet for German and English I always get shitty auto-generated captions.

I have disabled every setting they have, yet if I am logged in (which I am because I use yt premium) I get CCs.

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

#257

Post by estaseuropano »

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…

Well, try living in a country with two or more official languages. What you get is basically a random language. Anyone in those places suffers from such bad design choices.

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

#259

Post by onpensionsterm »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #27

Google goes further than that. If you go for a holiday in Thailand, you'll get all your search results dated with the Buddhist calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar. Nice work, world's best and brightest.

>Nice work, world's best and brightest.

I would be delighted to see the uproar if being bilingual+ became a FAANG requirement.

10000 guys who can implement a trie but only 100 who can communicate with more than 1/5th of their customers.

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