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How is it a change for good? Just seems like Google Search is becoming even clumsier for bilingual people. Sometimes I want results in my mother-tongue, someti

by Sylos 9y ago

How is it a change for good? Just seems like Google Search is becoming even clumsier for bilingual people. Sometimes I want results in my mother-tongue, sometimes I want results in English. And I expect my search engine to have a way to quickly specify that without going into the settings each time.

drusepth 9y ago
It's definitely a change for good for me. There might have been a way to set the locale in my settings before I didn't know about, but I've moved to a new country every month for over a year now and I never want to be redirected to the local Google (for a bunch of reasons). It's nice that I can just set American/Google.com apparently now, instead of manually flipping back every time I use google/maps.
- 482794793792894 9y ago
  Alright, but it really doesn't seem to me like fixing this issue for you would require breaking the search for bilingual people. There's gotta be so many better ways to resolve that.
  - drusepth 9y ago
    Just so I understand the problem, is search now broken for bilingual people because they sometimes prefer search results in one locale/language and sometimes prefer other search results in a different one? I also speak Spanish (and some Dutch), but I can't think of any time I'd actively want to use their local-Google, even while I lived in the Netherlands.
    - 482794793792894 9y ago
      As I understand it, English is your mother tongue. If so, that's probably why you don't have this issue. For me, French is my mother tongue and I live in France. So, there's lots of things that I'd want to research that are specific to France (laws, culture, geography etc.) and then obviously, if you speak French fluidly, you get much more precise and detailed information for these in French texts. If you're lucky, the English text is just a bad translation, but more often than not, the English text assumes that you must be some guy from a foreign country that really doesn't care about specifics and instead just wants an overview. On the other hand, if I need to look up technical information or most international science, then English is the lingua franca, what gives you the best results in most cases. In some cases, I'll even try both languages, just to make sure I'm not missing any useful information or to gauge which language gives better results (for example when a globally usable technology happens to be exceptionally popular in France).

by Sylos 9y ago

drusepth 9y ago

It's definitely a change for good for me. There might have been a way to set the locale in my settings before I didn't know about, but I've moved to a new country every month for over a year now and I never want to be redirected to the local Google (for a bunch of reasons). It's nice that I can just set American/Google.com apparently now, instead of manually flipping back every time I use google/maps.

482794793792894 9y ago
Alright, but it really doesn't seem to me like fixing this issue for you would require breaking the search for bilingual people. There's gotta be so many better ways to resolve that.
- drusepth 9y ago
  Just so I understand the problem, is search now broken for bilingual people because they sometimes prefer search results in one locale/language and sometimes prefer other search results in a different one? I also speak Spanish (and some Dutch), but I can't think of any time I'd actively want to use their local-Google, even while I lived in the Netherlands.
  - 482794793792894 9y ago
    As I understand it, English is your mother tongue. If so, that's probably why you don't have this issue. For me, French is my mother tongue and I live in France. So, there's lots of things that I'd want to research that are specific to France (laws, culture, geography etc.) and then obviously, if you speak French fluidly, you get much more precise and detailed information for these in French texts. If you're lucky, the English text is just a bad translation, but more often than not, the English text assumes that you must be some guy from a foreign country that really doesn't care about specifics and instead just wants an overview. On the other hand, if I need to look up technical information or most international science, then English is the lingua franca, what gives you the best results in most cases. In some cases, I'll even try both languages, just to make sure I'm not missing any useful information or to gauge which language gives better results (for example when a globally usable technology happens to be exceptionally popular in France).