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Google - Our History in Depth

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Re: Google - Our History in Depth

#43

Post by reginaldo »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #34
psbp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a huge overreaction.

Did I mention changing features (omitting some, changing the navigation to others) and search results (Stack Overflow tends not to show up in local searches in language xyz) ? And all this with no language/region switch in sight? Except the one inside the account settings, which Google then randomly ignores ? What would you consider to be the appropriate reaction to such a user experience? Or just imagine clicking on…

Most Google services accept and honor a "hl" URL parameter. So it would be http://www.google.com/about/company/history/?hl=en for English, and hl=nl for Dutch (not that you want it). No cookie cleaning is needed :)

Re: Google - Our History in Depth

#44

Post by randomhunt »

psbp wrote: post #26
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #24

I get this page in Dutch. I didn't ask for it and I can't change it. In fact, I'm logged in with an account which only has one language preference set (English), which Google happily ignores whenever it feels like. And it would be merely annoying if it only affected the interface language, but it changes features, search results and in this case the entire content. Which makes it pretty much impossible to participate…

This is a huge overreaction.

Not really, I feel exactly the same and as it's the top comment I guess a lot of other people do as well. I know it certainly comes up regularly both in the office (people traveling get very annoyed when Google decides they should fluently read the language of the country they're working in for that week) and among friends as a source of constant frustration.

Google isn't alone in doing it either, Bing has slavishly copied this absolute idiotic stupidity although they aren't anywhere near as insulting about it as Google _yet_ (e.g. where Google, Wordpress, Youtube etc. show it in the language it geolocates you to rather than either your browser's language or your profile's language)

Re: Google - Our History in Depth

#45

Post by randomhunt »

bsullivan01 wrote: post #32
twinge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try adding ?hl=en to the URL. A similar situation happened to my wife after visiting Germany, we had to edit her cookies and clear the "hl" parameter (IIRC) because various random Google sites were entirely in German.

"Try adding ?hl=en to the URL" How about suing a new fucking search engine, DDG or Bing?!!! Do this for that, that for that and we'll need a college degree on Google searching. I travel so my searches used to automatically transfer to google.cctld. No thanks!

Yeah but as Google do it so does Bing (after all why not copy Google's arrogance as well)

Just in case anyone is interested for Bing you have to use "?mkt=en-GB" (for example)

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