22 ms·

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

421 points by smallerfish 5y ago

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
I've had this problem with Steam and GOG. If you have a Dutch bank card, but you're only a few kilometers over in Germany: good luck buying any games.
mdesimone2 5y ago
Another one that pains me is Google Flight currency. It's always on the currency of the country I am. I have manually selected USD countless times and it always goes away.
enriquto 5y ago
This is extremely annoying and wrong in so many ways. Especially in countries that use multiple, say, conflicting languages, and Google's choices come off as culturally very insensitive, even offensive. It is so infuriating.
mtz_federico 5y ago
I believe that the best way to handle it is to show the page in the user's computer language and show a pop-up in the language of the country asking the user if they want to switch to the local language. Of course, an important detail is putting the "stay in <browser language>" button in the browser language.
minusf 5y ago
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".
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  google.com/ncr (no country redirect) was the panacea until Google broke it.
  - currysausage 5y ago
    Nowadays it's https://www.google.com/?gl=us&hl=en 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 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.
Sebb767 5y ago
Another option is that companies (mostly Google) have different offerings in different countries. In Germany, for example, they need to apply NetzDG filtering and I assume it's similar for countries all around the world. So my assumption is they don't redirect you for the language, they redirect you to the (slightly different) service for your current location, which happens to be in the local language.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  On these regionalized pages you can still change the language.
jakub_g 5y ago
The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc., not important. (FWIW native Windows Excel didn't have this issue, so I sticked with native Excel). --- Re: location based on geoloc: I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting slightly distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets all kinds of websites in French, and sometimes in German. Imagine this.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable or other shenanigans.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    In Germanic countries, it’s common to write numbers like 1.234,56 instead of the anglo standard of 1,234.56. Not just on paper, but also digitally. So a value in excel or a CSV is now 1234,56 instead of 1234.56. As result, CSV needs to use ; instead of , as separator Which is why TSV exists, because the tab character is universal.
    - zelphirkalt 5y ago
      I don't really care about what kind of punctuation Germanic countries are using, which I am not using, avoiding ambiguity in the first place. My software, including my browser, and my operating system is usually set to English, and I expect spreadsheet (data!) applications to not interpret whatever they want (based on IP address or location of companies or whatever), but actually interpret according to a standard. It is ridiculous for a spreadsheet application reading CSV (C! as in Comma!) to interpret the comma as a visual number decoration, instead of according to format, as a separator of cells.
tmalsburg2 5y ago
Which language Google uses is different from product to product. In Google forms, they use the language set in the Google account (neither location, nor browser language), which is frustrating, because as a designer of a survey you have no way to control the language the UI elements in your survey.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
This is extremely annoying, especially when you're in a country with high level of English proficiency and a small population. In that scenario, you're not going to have a lot of local language results. Something like Wikipedia, which has decent quality in English, will tend to look like it was edited by high school students. Yet Google will force-redirect you to the local Wikipedia language over the vastly superior English article, even when searching for something in English.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Modern search engines are just so stupid trying to outsmart us. When was the last time running a literal search between double quotes produced any significant results for you? Nowadays even with double quotes, they more or less all return what they think i meant depending on a plethora of criteria and not what i asked for. Thanks for marginalia search engine, it seems to be gaining in content and starts to be more and more useful lately! Though to be fair more *transparent* special-casing like you do for Wikipedia would be welcome in my humble view (eg. for technical documentation pointing to the reference site, etc).
  - a4isms 5y ago
    The usual excuse is that they are optimizing for results that produce clicks on paid search, rather than optimizing for your satisfaction with the search results.
metafunctor 5y ago
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.
- sebastien_b 5y ago
  >Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance Ignorance, or arrogance?
  - indymike 5y ago
    American who has been in that meeting a few times. It is mostly arrogant innocence... A kind of Dunning-Krueger like effect.
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  > Or, perhaps just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world where there are multiple official 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.
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    > This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where United States is always in the special top slot This used to be the case, but it seems to be becoming rare. It’s really annoying actually as alphabetically United States is way down in the list. This is how IP geolocation should be used imho, bubble up the probable location(s) to the top of the list, but DON’T assume the geo is right without asking.
throwmeariver1 5y ago
There is nothing worse than a site or program trying to guess my language by geo location. Just honor my settings.
realusername 5y ago
This thing has been broken for so long on Google, I don't think languages ever worked properly.
_Anima_ 5y ago
I live in the French speaking part of Belgium and have configured all my devices in English for the past 15+ years. Apparently Google consider that if you are geo IP located in Belgium with your devices in English, you _have to be_ a Dutch speaker. While I would agree that French speaking Belgians are in majority using French UIs, there are exceptions. Please respect my browser settings! The solution? I have to put French in my browser accepted languages (not necessarily first) and then Google understand I'm not a Dutch speaker and will stick to English.
- andromeduck 5y ago
  How did you even figure that one out?
  - stffndtz 5y ago
    Exactly my thought! Imagine the time spent on this..
  - _Anima_ 5y ago
    Came across the solution by chance, a couple of years ago. It's really maddening.
  - Fiahil 5y ago
    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 they don't match with your location, Google, Microsoft, and most other big tech companies go completely nuts. So, you get used to fiddling with languages settings. I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more than one language. PS: Speech recognition, autocorrect, and mobile keyboards : Same problem. PS2: Apple get it right most of the time.
rjtavares 5y ago
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...
- naoqj 5y ago
  As a Spaniard I am really tired of American companies that think that Mexican localisation for apps or websites is acceptable. 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.
arepublicadoceu 5y ago
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.
- dan_hawkins 5y ago
  Same for me here in Denmark for google and gmail - I don't f***g speak Danish!
  - m_st 5y ago
    So the Googlers in Zurich Switzerland should get a Swiss German version. I'm sure they'd fix that soon enough.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      The "fix" was probably to add an exception to the IP range of the Swiss office...
    - netsharc 5y ago
      I wonder if they don't have some VPN anyway so that the exit IP is something completely different to the region. Or if the Google searches even see the Internet, or if they stay within the "intranet".
- mbustamanter 5y ago
  Same, but with Spanish. My first language is Spanish but 99% of the media I consume is in English. Each time I log into YouTube my location is set to Chile and language to Spanish. Each time I change them to US and English. I've even sent complaints but nothing ever happens.
  - aeyes 5y ago
    That doesn't happen to me, I can open YouTube in incognito mode and the UI is in English. I'm not using a VPN. So it surely has to be your browser or OS settings. google.com on the other hand is Spanish.
rsstack 5y ago
Whenever I'm traveling abroad I set my phone & laptop default search engine to DuckDuckGo. The worse search results (sorry, but yes) are at least in English...
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo has also been guilty of this, even when I disable the prominent "regional results" toggle. I am in France but have everything set to en_US, and on some searches of rare technical keywords it will still mix in "Visit France" tourist websites, often within the first page. Ridiculous example: searching for "HID2HCI" (a bluetooth thing) returns as first result a business website from the French Alps. The second result is the English Wikipedia page for "Île-de-France" -- just why?? It doesn't matter which country I set in the "region filter" or whether I disable it entirely. And these "regional" results seem to be very random in that they will change and move up/down when I repeat the same search.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
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.
- yen223 5y ago
  I've been on holiday to Thailand, and Google most definitely did not use the buddhist calendar for my search results
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    Behavior is different if you’re logged in and depending on your settings I think.
    - petepete 5y ago
      There's just so many things at play it's really difficult to know what to blame. When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice. When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support. So I just don't use Assistant for anything.
      - tzot 5y ago
        > When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice. > When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support. Maybe Google's own analytics suggest that very few people in Manchester use Bluetooth gadgets, ergo you are in Liverpool. Or (more seriously even if as unlikely perhaps) maybe you have a duplicate Bluetooth MAC address, the other one located in Liverpool. Do you have Bluetooth turned on when not using your headphones? Does the answer depend on Bluetooth being on?
        5y ago
unglaublich 5y ago
Assuming that your user speaks the common language of their current location is as rude as any other kind of stereotyping.
southerntofu 5y ago
Off-topic, but wtf is wrong with images on this site? For some reason i had javascript enabled in my Tor Browser (safer mode) so whenever i hover an image it starts to fill the whole screen... which is inconvenient because images are already almost filling my screen so it's REALLY HARD to scroll away from them to read the text.
- smallerfish 5y ago
  Fair enough, I'll fix it. It's actually a CSS thing. In some of my travel articles it's nice to be able to see the images in full resolution, but the blog template I'm using squeezes them all to the column width. I'll add a click to zoom instead when I get a chance.
Arnt 5y ago
This doesn't even consider the possibility that location might be a more accurate indication of what language(s) the human user knows/prefers language than the browser setting is. 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?
- 0x006A 5y ago
  Its more like they fucked it up with some AI driven A/B testing and think they are doing the right thing but actually its just all broken now. They used to have /ncr (no country redirect) - open that in incognito mode and you have to accept some TOS in a language based on some idea of where the IP is.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  > After all, Google is famous for data collected and data-driven decisions. Remember that "41 shades of blue" story? Data (metrics really) isn’t the end all be all, and in particular the decisions resulting from the data is not bound to be good. As you say, Google is famous for data-driven decisions, and for instance android couldn’t become the top rated smartphone OS. Their shopping property couldn’t overcome competition despite unfair positioning, their social network couldn’t survive despite all the effort put in it. Looking at all their failures, why should we assume that here they made the best choice, when at an individual level we see it as deeply wrong ?
  - Arnt 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago
ratherbefuddled 5y ago
The only answer to the question is because google make more money if you sign in and share location data. There's no other logical reason a rough guess about where you might be in the world is a better method for determining your language needs than the specific request from the browser.
toxinu 5y ago
As a nomad traveler, this is the reason I stopped using Google as my primary search engine.
LamboJ 5y ago
I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.
- ivansavz 5y ago
  Yes, that's exactly my experience. Most people who install windows don't bother to set the locale correctly, so everyone ends up en-US. So if you trust the Accept Language header, you'll get it wrong.
  - nicolas_t 5y ago
    In which country did you see that? I'm curious because that contradicts my experience.
    - ivansavz 5y ago
      My anecdotes are from two countries: 1. In Quebec, Canada where French speakers keep the default en-US, even thought most of their work and communications will be in fr-CA. 2. In Bulgaria, because most people learned computer concepts in English so seeing OS and Browser menus in Bulgarian would be confusing to them.
      - nicolas_t 5y ago
        Thanks, I guess both cases make sense and in that case geolocation probably works better.
- nicolas_t 5y ago
  That hasn't been my experience both from running a site in Europe using the accept language header as default and from my anecdotal experience with friends in Asia and Europe. In general, I think using geoip is much more likely to get things wrong than using the accept language.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I built an iOS app once for a Dutch audience. We used the device's language as the app's language, because that makes sense, right? It's the same with the preferred language in a browser, right? Wrong; we got complaints from users that their app was in English instead of Dutch. Even though their device was set to English or another unsupported language. We begrudgingly added an app specific language preference. I repeated this later on for a package shipping webapp where on the login screen (and elsewhere iirc?) you can select a language; it defaults to your browser's Accept-Language header, but allows the user to override it. Lesson learned; Accept-Language is fine for the initial language, and if that header is not to be trusted, maybe IP / geolocation based. But always offer an easy way to set the language; you may be dealing with someone who doesn't live in the country of origin on a device / browser that isn't theirs. Also remember that location, locale and language are three different concepts entirely.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  First and foremost, thanks for having a very sane approach to this ! This is what other apps should tend to. > We used the device's language as the app's language, because that makes sense, right? One of the mistake devs do all the time is assuming users use _one_ language. It’s not the case for a very large portion of people around the globe.
  - Forricide 5y ago
    > It’s not the case for a very large portion of people around the globe. Yep, even people who speak one language might put their phone or browser into another language for learning (immersion) purposes but need your important (e.g. banking) application to be in their native language regardless.
  - littlecranky67 5y ago
    Yepp, just look at other responses here in this thread. People often assume that there is a system language that is used in the browser; that is only partly true, browser settings allow to specify multiple languages with given priority. It is just usually the default system language, until you configure it. The browser might not even use the system language in that setting at all if you configure otherwise.
dandare 5y ago
Spotify does this as well. I hate it. No, I do not speak the local language, stop!
trzeci 5y ago
Thanks for bringing that topic, for me as an expat it a major pain. I live in a country with rather unusual language, but I have only contact with English speaking people. And every service puts the locale of this in default - even with stating in browser settings what are my preferences. The worst part of this is that in many places I don't even know how to change local on specific pages manually. VPN is the only valuable option for me unfortunately.
tantalor 5y ago
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2539428 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2539428 > Settings you can change... > Language
nraynaud 5y ago
I'm so sorry for all these native English speakers missing out on the automatically translated pages put there to bait google and others. Then the "clever" ML people scour the web and use multilingual pages as rosetta stone to train their translation engine that they, of course, SEO to death. Long story short, "how do we say that word in English again" is a minfield on google.
milky2028 5y ago
I wonder if some sites are using JavaScript to handle language, but they don’t want to use navigator.language since below IE 11 doesn’t support it. In this case, it might make sense to fall back to location.
TonyTrapp 5y ago
The article mentions DHL. Which is another hilarious case if you dig deeper: I am in Germany but my browser's language is set to English, like the author's. dhl.com - the international website - automatically assumes that I want the German translation (like in the author's case), but dhl.de - the local, German website - respects my browser setting and serves content in English! This is completely upside-down :)
black_puppydog 5y ago
Having moved country twice I used to get very upset by this. Now though, I have just given up on google. They seem to have no interest (and no incentive, for lack of un-buy-out-able competition) to improve this. I mean, apart from the occasional vacation, how much of their userbase are really changing location regularly, right? And do those people have any real choice to opt out of using the shitty product anyhow? They still regularly show me map search results relevant to my place from 8 years ago. They still randomly switch me to this or that language based on VPN usage or such. Feels like a big middle finger that they haven't even attempted to solve this over the last 10 years or so since I first started noticing this. At least for search, I have recently switched to Kagi (based on a recommendation from here on HN) and haven't looked back. It's been... *checks mails* Oh, since new year's. Longer than any of my DuckDuckGo streaks. I honestly didn't expect this to stick, but once Kagi goes out of beta I think I'd subscribe if the price point is right. It's so refreshing to get good search results with no BS. And if something bad creeps in (which happened once so far, a StackOverflow SEO site) I can just block that page from ever showing up in my results again. So yeah, I use gmail & calendar for work on a separate account, and youtube privately. Apart from that, I avoid their products. Most of my apps on android are from f-droid, I open the play store a couple of times a year. It's just not worth the hassle, and that doesn't even get into the whole privacy & market dominance behaviour.
- openfuture 5y ago
  Yeah. Everyone knows better than you what you want. Even the dumb robots.
justinmayer 5y ago
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 am in Japan. It doesn’t matter that I read Japanese just fine… Making this determination purely based on my IP address is madness, I tell her. Over two decades later, nothing has changed. Each year I spend several months abroad, and this is one of the most infuriating experiences I encounter. Google is the offender that frustrates me the most, but they are far from the only company to engage in this abhorrent practice. I am tempted to create an Internationalization Wall of Shame just to embarrass the companies that do this. (Not that I expect them to care.) Why do they do this? My theory has always been that in any given country, there are far more native speakers with misconfigured computing environments than there are visitors and nomadic folks like me. So it’s merely a numbers game: I may be frustrated, but at least Google and other companies aren’t losing business when folks with misconfigured computers close the tab because they got a page served to them in, say, English instead of their native language. I can’t say for certain whether this is the actual reason for this behavior. What I can say, however, is that I absolutely loathe this practice and actively avoid doing business with any company that uses geo-IP location to serve me pages specific to that locale. If this frustrates you as well, be sure to vote with your feet!
- somedude895 5y ago
  Businesses usually put out their SEA ads in only the local language. All the people who have their device language set to one different from the current country's language won't see those ads. I could see that being a reason.
- jwr 5y ago
  Yes, I also find this infuriating. The list of languages I speak is sent with every request, in the Accept-Language header. And ignored. My suspicion is that people who actually write code related to this only speak a single language and only use sites in a single country.
- 5y ago
m_st 5y ago
It's like a well known friend reporting that Pornhub translates porn video titles to silly German titles, even though his system and browser run in English.
aww_dang 5y ago
The regionalized search results for Google and YouTube are probably the biggest annoyance. Even after setting the language options correctly in the respective services, I still get content suggested which has no relevance to me.
garyclarke27 5y ago
Many sites are so infuriating regarding language settings Tesla Website is one of the worst for this. I live in Portugal but speak English Tesla insists on serving up Portuguese and wont even let me select US or UK site.
lennoff 5y ago
Because of the company VPN, I usually teleport to Israel, and I have absolutely no idea how to change the language on a right-to-left layout with a Hebrew alphabet...
YaBomm 5y ago
quitit 5y ago
Their various services are inconsistent in how they detect language. Some elements may appear in the language associated with the user's location, while others are based on the browser setting. It's highly inconsistent, as someone who travels frequently it's also pretty annoying. Facebook properties have this problem as well.
virtualritz 5y ago
Traveling thorough Argentina in 2019 my phone showed all prices in Argentinian Pesos. Particularly annoying on Google Maps when looking for hotels. Crazy inflation made remembering an exchange rate to € or US$ useless. But what's more, after I returned to Europe this stayed for a few months. I.e. Google Maps still showed me hotel prices in Argentinian Pesos – in Europe!
jokteur 5y ago
I live in Switzerland and every website seems to think I speak German (I do, but this is not the point). Everything is configured in French on my computer, so why do you insist serving me content in German. Yes , I do understand that 66% of the country speaks Swiss German, but still, why can't the website respect my language preferences. The worst offender are the swiss websites (like digitec). You would think they at least understand the regional differences of Switzerland and they even have a website for each region, but still default on showing me the German version.
mihaic 5y ago
I do not work at Google, but I speculate that this is a case of software architecture leading the product: For fast results and scalability Google will just DNS-redirect you to the closest servers, and those servers are configured to a specific language. Sure, they could work on it, but for Google engineers cache is king, and for optimal performance they don't want to bother on personalizing that first access.
walnutclosefarm 5y ago
The inconsistency in how different companies and products within companies handle this are indeed annoying, and speak poorly for product management and engineering at these companies. But it's not as simple a problem as the article wants us to believe. Local laws often dictate different content or function for sites and applications served in their jurisdiction, leaving the product with a hard choice: if Japanese law requires that I get a Japanese version (from a function point of view) of a site when browsing from Japan, but the browser settings request French language, I may or may not have a French translation of the Japanese function to serve. I think a lot of the irregularity is just bad product management and engineering, but some of it is actually trying to deal with a hard problem.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Xophmeister 5y ago
What happens in countries that have multiple official languages that can't be determined geographically? I only assume such places exist, or there must be places on the borders where the accuracy of geo-IP and the demographics aren't clear-cut.
hericium 5y ago
When I'm abroad, visible under another country's IP address and my system's language is set to English, neither should be used to assign the language. What should be used is locale. Some users may have operating systems in language different to their own but probably more users have proper keyboard language set in their OS. Using IP address to assign the language is the dumbest choice possible but using OS language is not much better.
qwerty456127 5y ago
This always baffled me. Although English is not my native language I strongly dislike UIs being in any language but English. Every settings on my PCs says use English, all the apps are English versions, yet every time I find myself in another country Google uses its language to speak to me. I'm not sure I will even find how to switch the language to anything readable once I land in e.g. Japan or Armenia...
lukaesch 5y ago
The challenge for international platforms/websites are the legal/business requirements per region and it boils down to costs to streamline translations. Organizations split responsibilities by countries/regions. Local experts get hired to optimize content for their target markets. The back and forth between local subsidiaries/experts with centralized product development teams is more complex, slower and expensive. So you would rather create dedicated customer facing sites per region that are maintained by local teams who take care of location-specific differences (Netflix filtering, Google search results, etc.) The bigger the org gets the harder a streamlined multi-language (often also multi-currency) business model gets and hence companies opt to geo-location instead of using header lang. Probably, there are more points, but that’s what I have learned after building an international m-commerce platform that serves users in the EU, US and Mexico
Kim_Bruning 5y ago
A trick-ish that I've learned is to use Irish locale where possible (en-ie) , because that's a combination of English and Metric (the only sane international combination not to go wrong). Of course this still breaks when software tries location sniffing and puts me $elsewhere.
kozak 5y ago
This "Hey, you are from Ukraine, let us switch you to the Russian language" behavior I see in some places literally causes me PTSD. I got pissed off this way by Adobe just yesterday. Please don't do it people. I don't have the Russian language configured on any of my devices and in any of my accounts (and never had), they do it purely by location.
lukaesch 5y ago
The challenge for international platforms/websites are the legal/business requirements per region and it boils down to costs to streamline translations. Organizations split responsibilities by countries/regions. Local experts get hired to optimize content for their target markets. The back and forth between local subsidiaries/experts with centralized product development teams is more complex, slower and expensive. So you would rather create dedicated customer facing sites per region that are maintained by local teams who take care of location-specific differences (Netflix filtering, Google search results, etc.) The bigger the org gets the harder a streamlined multi-language (often also multi-currency) business model gets and hence companies opt to geo-location instead of using header lang. Probably, there are more points, but that’s what I have learned after building an international m-commerce platform that serves users in the EU, US and Mexico. It is not a tech issue.
d3k 5y ago
This is a common thing in software too I fear. I have Firefox on macOS. Everything is configured for US English, but I live in France. When I tell Firefox to save a page (or download something), the dialog prompts me to "Enregistrer sous..." (i.e.: "Save As..."). No idea why this happens.
dwheeler 5y ago
I agree, assuming the language based on where you happen to be (instead of your actual request) is completely wrong. There are websites that do it correctly. This website, which I maintain, correctly uses the browser setting: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org Perhaps what would be helpful would be to modify services that already evaluate websites to also determine if they switch locale correctly. If people see that there is an error, it's more likely to get fixed.
jve 5y ago
Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT included in home edition? Ridiculous. Luckily there was "Vistalizator" where you could install language pack of choice. Anyway, after multiple OS releases like that, they finally dropped that nonsense starting with Windows 8.
- johnwalkr 5y ago
  I have one windows PC that has heritage back to 2016, was originally installed in Japanese, then switched to English. It always had a Windows 10 pro license, and there is still in 2022 many places in the OS that only show up in Japanese. And many smaller and enterprise apps use region instead of language to set the language.
- cesarb 5y ago
  > Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT included in home edition? I remember Microsoft Windows (and MS-DOS) having a hardcoded OS display language; if you installed a Brazilian edition of Microsoft Windows, all you got is Brazilian Portuguese, since the translations are hardcoded within each binary (but you could still change things like date format and keyboard layout), and if you wanted a different OS display language, you had to wipe and reinstall. I vaguely recall reading that this had changed starting with IIRC Windows Vista, which put the translations in separate files (instead of hardcoding them in the executables and DLLs).
VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
For several years, my google pixel phones were returning a strange mixture of Arabic results. At the time, I was living in Texas, but I had taken some Arabic classes in college earlier that year, so I would often google sentences to see if they were grammatically correct. Then, I contacted google support at least five times and they were never able to figure it out. Even on another pixel, I was STILL getting Arabic results. After another year, I finally changed to Apple, and my google results are normal again.
jewel 5y ago
A workaround: To force search results in English when not signed in, go to https://www.google.com/en https://www.google.com/en. This adds a hl=en parameter to your queries. You can change the search provider URL in the browser to add the hl parameter.
- InvaderFizz 5y ago
  The irony is that I clicked that URL on my iPhone, signed in to Safari with everything set to US/English. About half the entries below the search bar(they now add news below) are in Spanish. My current location is Unknown if I scroll all the way to the bottom. Probably Google unsure of what to make of my whole house VPN where the desktop browsers use a fake location extension to automatically say yes to location requests but provide them with a static location in SoCal that matches the area of my IP block, but whenever I use google apps on my devices, they end up with GPS coordinates that place me deep within Mexico.
itvision 5y ago
This has been my pet peeve for ages. Google ignores the Accept-Language header on pretty much all of its websites and uses your location instead. And I fucking hate them for that.
malthaus 5y ago
My fav in this regard is Amazon: I can manually set a language in the settings, but those get at random times overwritten by my browser language setting. So why have it in the first place?
- ajolly 5y ago
  Amazon will occasionally randomly ignore my browser and my Amazon language setting forcing me to Spanish. (In Puerto Rico)
egberts1 5y ago
because … Google is anti-ethnocentric (as opposed to anti-ethnicentric)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pxue 5y ago
Been traveling in Mexico/Latin Am since the pandemic and this is so much more painful than I expected. I work on multiple projects as a consultant and so I often create a new browser profile for new clients (keep sessions, sign-ins etc separate). Every time i boot up a new profile, everything gets switched to Spanish, mexican results. Please Google, stahp.
thedougd 5y ago
Similarly, why do I encounter phone apps that ask me if I want F or C temps, 24 hour or 12 hour, and date formats? Use the locale, at least as a default. I do get the scenario where I may want to work in another set of units than my locale, but I find the locale is frequently just ignored by these apps.
theginger 5y ago
This article isn't looking at both sides. I am in an English speaking country and Google absolutely does honour my accept language header, eg is set to French I get french. I suspect that a non English speaker with an English language configured device in a non English speaking country is sufficiently more common than the other way round that they choose to make an exception and ignore en accept-language headers
Smithalicious 5y ago
I'm currently in France and I've resorted to just using duckduckgo. It's the same class of accessibility error as tying shipping address to website language, which I still see all the time, too.[0] When will we learn that people don't necessarily speak the native language of the place they reside? This isn't even uncommon, there's expats and tourists and foreign students and business travelers abound. [0] Framework required me to use the French language website to ship to France, for instance. My forum post suggesting this be changed got unceremoniously merged into some megathread and ignored.
bakhy 5y ago
Just BTW on the Netflix subtitles issue - I live in Germany, but I'm not German and generally prefer original audio on everything, typically with English subtitles. And some movies and series on Netflix will really only offer German subtitles, or, even worse, only German audio. No option to choose original. All movies that have such limited audio/subtitle options, when I play them, start with a title card of a German distributor, so I would believe Netflix on that one.
sokoloff 5y ago
There are definitely cases where I want “whatever is local” and others where “whatever my normal default is”. If I’m getting driving directions in a place where the car and road signs are in kilometers, I probably want my directions in kilometers as well, even if my default is stupid-units.
donatj 5y ago
Years ago I built a language system that parsed Accept-Lang and compared your preferences to what we had available. There was also a drop down at the bottom of the page to manually override. I thought it worked really slick, but we got complaints. The majority of our users were English speaking despite their Accept-Lang preferences and expected us to serve in English. We switched to just default English with the dropdown there if you want something else. Made me a little sad.
chrisdbanks 5y ago
For me, whichever you choose, you should make it easy for the user to change the language. Living in Spain as an English speaker I often end up on a Spanish version with no obvious way to change to English. That is the real sin.
lokar 5y ago
The reason is straight forward. They have data that shows most people outside the US have the setting wrong. For the .com (American!) domain the default is English. For each country specific site the default is the primary local language. You can change the default via a cookie.
- account42 5y ago
  > For the .com (American!) domain the default is English. If only. The geolocation talked about here is taking place on the .com domain. Worse, even if you manage to switch it to english (they have been hiding that link more and more) it will still use geolocation to push search results in the "local" language.
Neil44 5y ago
It’s a pain in the ass, I have a client who’s WAN exits in Swizerland so you have to manually set everything to correct locale, not just Google all kinds of stuff.
rjmunro 5y ago
I think there are 2 valid reasons: 1. Sometimes for legal or practical reasons other than language, the site needs to be different in different places, e.g. terms and conditions, cookie popups, prices legally required to include tax etc. These have to be based on the users location. 2. Users don't set their browser language correctly. The options to change are hidden where no one looks and hard to understand - you an allow multiple languages and set a preferred order for them. I think this was common years ago, but is probably no so much the case now - it will default to the system language.
pelorat 5y ago
They do it because they want you to always be logged in to your Google account. If you're logged in you can simply change your language settings there.
brodo 5y ago
If you search for an english book title on Amazon.de it gets auto-translated to german. I first saw this a couple of weeks ago and it was super confusing. Chances are the search results will be nonsense or empty.
Mikeb85 5y ago
I really wish you could specify the search language or internationalisation. Sometimes I search in English, French, Italian, Czech or Ukrainian, I also split time between Canada, France and Czech Republic, can read all these languages well enough to want contextual results for each, but inevitably I still get results focused only on my actual location which is slightly infuriating...
unreal37 5y ago
This is currently affecting me. Google serves me results in Portuguese. The results are poor for me, because I can't read the language. The suggested websites are in Portuguese. And there's no way around this? It's crazy!
nelgaard 5y ago
At least if you use Tor Browser, you will learn a few words in just about every language.
someelephant 5y ago
google flights using your profile language preference but then listing all flights in local currency :(
HALtheWise 5y ago
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?
- netsharc 5y ago
  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"
amacneil 5y ago
I have not had a chance to test this yet, but apparently setting your locale to en-CA (rather than en-US) solves the problem, since Google no longer assumes you're using default language settings. Anyone have success with this?
asiachick 5y ago
what's failing for me, I want result in Japanese but google thinks I want Chinese. I'm not in China or Japan but Chinese is not in my language preferences. Switching to google.co.jp didn't help.
antematerija 5y ago
You can set language to be anything you want regardless of location. E.g. on mobile just scroll to bottom of fist page and pick different language. E.g. on desktop just go to settings and pick language. I'm pretty sure this works awesome since I've used this all my life. I would expect power users to look for simple solution instead of ranting. Who the hell are you guys if you can't find language settings!!!
- slig 5y ago
  It doesn't work. That's the point.
  - antematerija 5y ago
    It does work. I use this my entire life. Please read my comment. I'm talking about language settings on Google and not browser settings. Somehow people believe that a multi trillion dollar company hasn't ran live experiments on this. The default settings are adapted so the probability of correct language for people who can't find language settings is maximized. Guys, please use common sense. The alternative is to believe that Google engineers are either not educated or don't know ab testing.
Tagbert 5y ago
Default is one thing, but why is there not an obvious and easy way for users to override the language chosen by Google and make that selection permanent? Not giving users control is a terrible user experience.
elif 5y ago
aside: designers, please never do this mouseover fill the window js... this is painful
bjoli 5y ago
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.
mcswell 5y ago
"Because we're Google, we know better than you."
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.ph/zHE8R https://archive.ph/zHE8R http://web.archive.org/web/20220311170532/https://smaller.fish/posts/language http://web.archive.org/web/20220311170532/https://smaller.fi...
etchalon 5y ago
This is super non-interesting. But every jurisdiction has unique laws, company policies, release schedules, etc. So, for every jurisdiction, you have unique official text. The unique official text will always be available in the majority languages of the jurisdiction. The people who work in the jurisdiction speak it, and write in it, and can easily generate it. Non-majority languages require translators. Hiring people. Workflows. Approvals, etc. So it's easier to go off location, because then I know you're reading the right official text, and if you can't read the official text in the native language, it's on you to translate. This gets harder the bigger the company, especially in cases where the "company" is a bunch of independent subsidiaries.
richardfey 5y ago
eBay is another big offender, you need to change your physical address or the TLD.
traspler 5y ago
The Netflix thing makes me so angry sometimes. They have the show, the title, description, episode titles and descriptions are all localized to my language of choice (English), but when I actually start watching I can only select French or Original Dub & French Sub.
jbj 5y ago
Same annoyance since I remember learning about the internet, and realizing the language for computers with the least friction is US english. One thing I found extremely bizare is that `wget` on my work computer gives status and error messages in my local language. I have no clue how it ended up like this, but I am suspecting it is due to the usage of a local mirror of macports.
hardwaresofton 5y ago
Well, I got banned from google ads for using an American credit card because they auto set my language to japan and charged in Yen. Absolutely ridiculous, and now there’s seemingly no recourse.
delecti 5y ago
I recently noticed this while browsing their device store from Germany. I couldn't get to the US shop no matter what I tried changing. There's a language and locale query parameter in the URL, but it will forcibly redirect you back if you try to change it. I'm not sure what it's even there for.
thayne 5y ago
> The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US maybe browser should default to sending no value or a special "default" value for Accept-Language. So that sites can use location if it is the default, but if you explicitly configure your browser to use en-US, then it will respect that.
lern_too_spel 5y ago
Because Google's PMs think they know better than their users and are so arrogant in this belief that they won't even bother running an AB test.
rapjr9 5y ago
My guess is that large companies may be required to switch to the geolocated national language preferences of a countries government so that a nation preserves its identity. If you are in the USA and you can switch your language preference to the UK your mindset starts to trend towards UK thinking. Region locks on DVD's and Blu-Ray disks may have a similar purpose, to preserve local culture. This seems both good and bad, bad in that it discourages cross-cultural exposure and thinking, and good in that it makes the world richer because cultural diversity encourages many different approaches to life which may benefit everyone whenever cultures do mix, sort of a redundancy of operating systems so to speak.
powerapple 5y ago
google is super annoying on this. And sometimes it is just hard to change language, especially on mobile.
bartimus 5y ago
Because Google wants to put you in contact with localized businesses and their advertising.
felber 5y ago
I am able to bypass this by adding a second language to my browser (e.g. I have en-US AND something else). Theory: en-US is the default so Google just ignores it.

421 points by smallerfish 5y ago

I've had this problem with Steam and GOG. If you have a Dutch bank card, but you're only a few kilometers over in Germany: good luck buying any games.

mdesimone2 5y ago

Another one that pains me is Google Flight currency. It's always on the currency of the country I am. I have manually selected USD countless times and it always goes away.

enriquto 5y ago

This is extremely annoying and wrong in so many ways. Especially in countries that use multiple, say, conflicting languages, and Google's choices come off as culturally very insensitive, even offensive. It is so infuriating.

mtz_federico 5y ago

I believe that the best way to handle it is to show the page in the user's computer language and show a pop-up in the language of the country asking the user if they want to switch to the local language. Of course, an important detail is putting the "stay in <browser language>" button in the browser language.

minusf 5y ago

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".

emptyparadise 5y ago
google.com/ncr (no country redirect) was the panacea until Google broke it.
- currysausage 5y ago
  Nowadays it's https://www.google.com/?gl=us&hl=en 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 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.

Sebb767 5y ago

Another option is that companies (mostly Google) have different offerings in different countries. In Germany, for example, they need to apply NetzDG filtering and I assume it's similar for countries all around the world. So my assumption is they don't redirect you for the language, they redirect you to the (slightly different) service for your current location, which happens to be in the local language.

zamadatix 5y ago
On these regionalized pages you can still change the language.

jakub_g 5y ago

The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc., not important. (FWIW native Windows Excel didn't have this issue, so I sticked with native Excel). --- Re: location based on geoloc: I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting slightly distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets all kinds of websites in French, and sometimes in German. Imagine this.

zelphirkalt 5y ago
And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable or other shenanigans.
- kuschku 5y ago
  In Germanic countries, it’s common to write numbers like 1.234,56 instead of the anglo standard of 1,234.56. Not just on paper, but also digitally. So a value in excel or a CSV is now 1234,56 instead of 1234.56. As result, CSV needs to use ; instead of , as separator Which is why TSV exists, because the tab character is universal.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    I don't really care about what kind of punctuation Germanic countries are using, which I am not using, avoiding ambiguity in the first place. My software, including my browser, and my operating system is usually set to English, and I expect spreadsheet (data!) applications to not interpret whatever they want (based on IP address or location of companies or whatever), but actually interpret according to a standard. It is ridiculous for a spreadsheet application reading CSV (C! as in Comma!) to interpret the comma as a visual number decoration, instead of according to format, as a separator of cells.

tmalsburg2 5y ago

Which language Google uses is different from product to product. In Google forms, they use the language set in the Google account (neither location, nor browser language), which is frustrating, because as a designer of a survey you have no way to control the language the UI elements in your survey.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

This is extremely annoying, especially when you're in a country with high level of English proficiency and a small population. In that scenario, you're not going to have a lot of local language results. Something like Wikipedia, which has decent quality in English, will tend to look like it was edited by high school students. Yet Google will force-redirect you to the local Wikipedia language over the vastly superior English article, even when searching for something in English.

southerntofu 5y ago
Modern search engines are just so stupid trying to outsmart us. When was the last time running a literal search between double quotes produced any significant results for you? Nowadays even with double quotes, they more or less all return what they think i meant depending on a plethora of criteria and not what i asked for. Thanks for marginalia search engine, it seems to be gaining in content and starts to be more and more useful lately! Though to be fair more *transparent* special-casing like you do for Wikipedia would be welcome in my humble view (eg. for technical documentation pointing to the reference site, etc).
- a4isms 5y ago
  The usual excuse is that they are optimizing for results that produce clicks on paid search, rather than optimizing for your satisfaction with the search results.

metafunctor 5y ago

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.

sebastien_b 5y ago
>Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance Ignorance, or arrogance?
- indymike 5y ago
  American who has been in that meeting a few times. It is mostly arrogant innocence... A kind of Dunning-Krueger like effect.
Jaruzel 5y ago
> Or, perhaps just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world where there are multiple official 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.
- jsjohnst 5y ago
  > This is compounded by those location drop-downs, Where United States is always in the special top slot This used to be the case, but it seems to be becoming rare. It’s really annoying actually as alphabetically United States is way down in the list. This is how IP geolocation should be used imho, bubble up the probable location(s) to the top of the list, but DON’T assume the geo is right without asking.

throwmeariver1 5y ago

There is nothing worse than a site or program trying to guess my language by geo location. Just honor my settings.

realusername 5y ago

This thing has been broken for so long on Google, I don't think languages ever worked properly.

_Anima_ 5y ago

I live in the French speaking part of Belgium and have configured all my devices in English for the past 15+ years. Apparently Google consider that if you are geo IP located in Belgium with your devices in English, you _have to be_ a Dutch speaker. While I would agree that French speaking Belgians are in majority using French UIs, there are exceptions. Please respect my browser settings! The solution? I have to put French in my browser accepted languages (not necessarily first) and then Google understand I'm not a Dutch speaker and will stick to English.

andromeduck 5y ago
How did you even figure that one out?
- stffndtz 5y ago
  Exactly my thought! Imagine the time spent on this..
- _Anima_ 5y ago
  Came across the solution by chance, a couple of years ago. It's really maddening.
- Fiahil 5y ago
  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 they don't match with your location, Google, Microsoft, and most other big tech companies go completely nuts. So, you get used to fiddling with languages settings. I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more than one language. PS: Speech recognition, autocorrect, and mobile keyboards : Same problem. PS2: Apple get it right most of the time.

rjtavares 5y ago

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...

naoqj 5y ago
As a Spaniard I am really tired of American companies that think that Mexican localisation for apps or websites is acceptable. 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.

arepublicadoceu 5y ago

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.

dan_hawkins 5y ago
Same for me here in Denmark for google and gmail - I don't f***g speak Danish!
- m_st 5y ago
  So the Googlers in Zurich Switzerland should get a Swiss German version. I'm sure they'd fix that soon enough.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    The "fix" was probably to add an exception to the IP range of the Swiss office...
  - netsharc 5y ago
    I wonder if they don't have some VPN anyway so that the exit IP is something completely different to the region. Or if the Google searches even see the Internet, or if they stay within the "intranet".
mbustamanter 5y ago
Same, but with Spanish. My first language is Spanish but 99% of the media I consume is in English. Each time I log into YouTube my location is set to Chile and language to Spanish. Each time I change them to US and English. I've even sent complaints but nothing ever happens.
- aeyes 5y ago
  That doesn't happen to me, I can open YouTube in incognito mode and the UI is in English. I'm not using a VPN. So it surely has to be your browser or OS settings. google.com on the other hand is Spanish.

rsstack 5y ago

Whenever I'm traveling abroad I set my phone & laptop default search engine to DuckDuckGo. The worse search results (sorry, but yes) are at least in English...

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
DuckDuckGo has also been guilty of this, even when I disable the prominent "regional results" toggle. I am in France but have everything set to en_US, and on some searches of rare technical keywords it will still mix in "Visit France" tourist websites, often within the first page. Ridiculous example: searching for "HID2HCI" (a bluetooth thing) returns as first result a business website from the French Alps. The second result is the English Wikipedia page for "Île-de-France" -- just why?? It doesn't matter which country I set in the "region filter" or whether I disable it entirely. And these "regional" results seem to be very random in that they will change and move up/down when I repeat the same search.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

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.

yen223 5y ago
I've been on holiday to Thailand, and Google most definitely did not use the buddhist calendar for my search results
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Behavior is different if you’re logged in and depending on your settings I think.
  - petepete 5y ago
    There's just so many things at play it's really difficult to know what to blame. When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice. When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support. So I just don't use Assistant for anything.
    - tzot 5y ago
      > When I ask Google Assistant "where am I?" on my phone it tells me I'm in Manchester. Nice. > When I ask the same question on my Bluetooth headphones it says Liverpool. I can't get it to work. It's been like that for a year. Can't get any support. Maybe Google's own analytics suggest that very few people in Manchester use Bluetooth gadgets, ergo you are in Liverpool. Or (more seriously even if as unlikely perhaps) maybe you have a duplicate Bluetooth MAC address, the other one located in Liverpool. Do you have Bluetooth turned on when not using your headphones? Does the answer depend on Bluetooth being on?
      - 5y ago

unglaublich 5y ago

Assuming that your user speaks the common language of their current location is as rude as any other kind of stereotyping.

southerntofu 5y ago

Off-topic, but wtf is wrong with images on this site? For some reason i had javascript enabled in my Tor Browser (safer mode) so whenever i hover an image it starts to fill the whole screen... which is inconvenient because images are already almost filling my screen so it's REALLY HARD to scroll away from them to read the text.

smallerfish 5y ago
Fair enough, I'll fix it. It's actually a CSS thing. In some of my travel articles it's nice to be able to see the images in full resolution, but the blog template I'm using squeezes them all to the column width. I'll add a click to zoom instead when I get a chance.

Arnt 5y ago

This doesn't even consider the possibility that location might be a more accurate indication of what language(s) the human user knows/prefers language than the browser setting is. 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?

0x006A 5y ago
Its more like they fucked it up with some AI driven A/B testing and think they are doing the right thing but actually its just all broken now. They used to have /ncr (no country redirect) - open that in incognito mode and you have to accept some TOS in a language based on some idea of where the IP is.
makeitdouble 5y ago
> After all, Google is famous for data collected and data-driven decisions. Remember that "41 shades of blue" story? Data (metrics really) isn’t the end all be all, and in particular the decisions resulting from the data is not bound to be good. As you say, Google is famous for data-driven decisions, and for instance android couldn’t become the top rated smartphone OS. Their shopping property couldn’t overcome competition despite unfair positioning, their social network couldn’t survive despite all the effort put in it. Looking at all their failures, why should we assume that here they made the best choice, when at an individual level we see it as deeply wrong ?
- Arnt 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago

ratherbefuddled 5y ago

The only answer to the question is because google make more money if you sign in and share location data. There's no other logical reason a rough guess about where you might be in the world is a better method for determining your language needs than the specific request from the browser.

toxinu 5y ago

As a nomad traveler, this is the reason I stopped using Google as my primary search engine.

LamboJ 5y ago

I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.

ivansavz 5y ago
Yes, that's exactly my experience. Most people who install windows don't bother to set the locale correctly, so everyone ends up en-US. So if you trust the Accept Language header, you'll get it wrong.
- nicolas_t 5y ago
  In which country did you see that? I'm curious because that contradicts my experience.
  - ivansavz 5y ago
    My anecdotes are from two countries: 1. In Quebec, Canada where French speakers keep the default en-US, even thought most of their work and communications will be in fr-CA. 2. In Bulgaria, because most people learned computer concepts in English so seeing OS and Browser menus in Bulgarian would be confusing to them.
    - nicolas_t 5y ago
      Thanks, I guess both cases make sense and in that case geolocation probably works better.
nicolas_t 5y ago
That hasn't been my experience both from running a site in Europe using the accept language header as default and from my anecdotal experience with friends in Asia and Europe. In general, I think using geoip is much more likely to get things wrong than using the accept language.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I built an iOS app once for a Dutch audience. We used the device's language as the app's language, because that makes sense, right? It's the same with the preferred language in a browser, right? Wrong; we got complaints from users that their app was in English instead of Dutch. Even though their device was set to English or another unsupported language. We begrudgingly added an app specific language preference. I repeated this later on for a package shipping webapp where on the login screen (and elsewhere iirc?) you can select a language; it defaults to your browser's Accept-Language header, but allows the user to override it. Lesson learned; Accept-Language is fine for the initial language, and if that header is not to be trusted, maybe IP / geolocation based. But always offer an easy way to set the language; you may be dealing with someone who doesn't live in the country of origin on a device / browser that isn't theirs. Also remember that location, locale and language are three different concepts entirely.

makeitdouble 5y ago
First and foremost, thanks for having a very sane approach to this ! This is what other apps should tend to. > We used the device's language as the app's language, because that makes sense, right? One of the mistake devs do all the time is assuming users use _one_ language. It’s not the case for a very large portion of people around the globe.
- Forricide 5y ago
  > It’s not the case for a very large portion of people around the globe. Yep, even people who speak one language might put their phone or browser into another language for learning (immersion) purposes but need your important (e.g. banking) application to be in their native language regardless.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  Yepp, just look at other responses here in this thread. People often assume that there is a system language that is used in the browser; that is only partly true, browser settings allow to specify multiple languages with given priority. It is just usually the default system language, until you configure it. The browser might not even use the system language in that setting at all if you configure otherwise.

dandare 5y ago

Spotify does this as well. I hate it. No, I do not speak the local language, stop!

trzeci 5y ago

Thanks for bringing that topic, for me as an expat it a major pain. I live in a country with rather unusual language, but I have only contact with English speaking people. And every service puts the locale of this in default - even with stating in browser settings what are my preferences. The worst part of this is that in many places I don't even know how to change local on specific pages manually. VPN is the only valuable option for me unfortunately.

tantalor 5y ago

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2539428 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2539428 > Settings you can change... > Language

nraynaud 5y ago

I'm so sorry for all these native English speakers missing out on the automatically translated pages put there to bait google and others. Then the "clever" ML people scour the web and use multilingual pages as rosetta stone to train their translation engine that they, of course, SEO to death. Long story short, "how do we say that word in English again" is a minfield on google.

milky2028 5y ago

I wonder if some sites are using JavaScript to handle language, but they don’t want to use navigator.language since below IE 11 doesn’t support it. In this case, it might make sense to fall back to location.

TonyTrapp 5y ago

The article mentions DHL. Which is another hilarious case if you dig deeper: I am in Germany but my browser's language is set to English, like the author's. dhl.com - the international website - automatically assumes that I want the German translation (like in the author's case), but dhl.de - the local, German website - respects my browser setting and serves content in English! This is completely upside-down :)

black_puppydog 5y ago

Having moved country twice I used to get very upset by this. Now though, I have just given up on google. They seem to have no interest (and no incentive, for lack of un-buy-out-able competition) to improve this. I mean, apart from the occasional vacation, how much of their userbase are really changing location regularly, right? And do those people have any real choice to opt out of using the shitty product anyhow? They still regularly show me map search results relevant to my place from 8 years ago. They still randomly switch me to this or that language based on VPN usage or such. Feels like a big middle finger that they haven't even attempted to solve this over the last 10 years or so since I first started noticing this. At least for search, I have recently switched to Kagi (based on a recommendation from here on HN) and haven't looked back. It's been... *checks mails* Oh, since new year's. Longer than any of my DuckDuckGo streaks. I honestly didn't expect this to stick, but once Kagi goes out of beta I think I'd subscribe if the price point is right. It's so refreshing to get good search results with no BS. And if something bad creeps in (which happened once so far, a StackOverflow SEO site) I can just block that page from ever showing up in my results again. So yeah, I use gmail & calendar for work on a separate account, and youtube privately. Apart from that, I avoid their products. Most of my apps on android are from f-droid, I open the play store a couple of times a year. It's just not worth the hassle, and that doesn't even get into the whole privacy & market dominance behaviour.

openfuture 5y ago
Yeah. Everyone knows better than you what you want. Even the dumb robots.

justinmayer 5y ago

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 am in Japan. It doesn’t matter that I read Japanese just fine… Making this determination purely based on my IP address is madness, I tell her. Over two decades later, nothing has changed. Each year I spend several months abroad, and this is one of the most infuriating experiences I encounter. Google is the offender that frustrates me the most, but they are far from the only company to engage in this abhorrent practice. I am tempted to create an Internationalization Wall of Shame just to embarrass the companies that do this. (Not that I expect them to care.) Why do they do this? My theory has always been that in any given country, there are far more native speakers with misconfigured computing environments than there are visitors and nomadic folks like me. So it’s merely a numbers game: I may be frustrated, but at least Google and other companies aren’t losing business when folks with misconfigured computers close the tab because they got a page served to them in, say, English instead of their native language. I can’t say for certain whether this is the actual reason for this behavior. What I can say, however, is that I absolutely loathe this practice and actively avoid doing business with any company that uses geo-IP location to serve me pages specific to that locale. If this frustrates you as well, be sure to vote with your feet!

somedude895 5y ago
Businesses usually put out their SEA ads in only the local language. All the people who have their device language set to one different from the current country's language won't see those ads. I could see that being a reason.
jwr 5y ago
Yes, I also find this infuriating. The list of languages I speak is sent with every request, in the Accept-Language header. And ignored. My suspicion is that people who actually write code related to this only speak a single language and only use sites in a single country.
5y ago

m_st 5y ago

It's like a well known friend reporting that Pornhub translates porn video titles to silly German titles, even though his system and browser run in English.

aww_dang 5y ago

The regionalized search results for Google and YouTube are probably the biggest annoyance. Even after setting the language options correctly in the respective services, I still get content suggested which has no relevance to me.

garyclarke27 5y ago

Many sites are so infuriating regarding language settings Tesla Website is one of the worst for this. I live in Portugal but speak English Tesla insists on serving up Portuguese and wont even let me select US or UK site.

lennoff 5y ago

Because of the company VPN, I usually teleport to Israel, and I have absolutely no idea how to change the language on a right-to-left layout with a Hebrew alphabet...

YaBomm 5y ago

quitit 5y ago

Their various services are inconsistent in how they detect language. Some elements may appear in the language associated with the user's location, while others are based on the browser setting. It's highly inconsistent, as someone who travels frequently it's also pretty annoying. Facebook properties have this problem as well.

virtualritz 5y ago

Traveling thorough Argentina in 2019 my phone showed all prices in Argentinian Pesos. Particularly annoying on Google Maps when looking for hotels. Crazy inflation made remembering an exchange rate to € or US$ useless. But what's more, after I returned to Europe this stayed for a few months. I.e. Google Maps still showed me hotel prices in Argentinian Pesos – in Europe!

jokteur 5y ago

I live in Switzerland and every website seems to think I speak German (I do, but this is not the point). Everything is configured in French on my computer, so why do you insist serving me content in German. Yes , I do understand that 66% of the country speaks Swiss German, but still, why can't the website respect my language preferences. The worst offender are the swiss websites (like digitec). You would think they at least understand the regional differences of Switzerland and they even have a website for each region, but still default on showing me the German version.

mihaic 5y ago

I do not work at Google, but I speculate that this is a case of software architecture leading the product: For fast results and scalability Google will just DNS-redirect you to the closest servers, and those servers are configured to a specific language. Sure, they could work on it, but for Google engineers cache is king, and for optimal performance they don't want to bother on personalizing that first access.

walnutclosefarm 5y ago

The inconsistency in how different companies and products within companies handle this are indeed annoying, and speak poorly for product management and engineering at these companies. But it's not as simple a problem as the article wants us to believe. Local laws often dictate different content or function for sites and applications served in their jurisdiction, leaving the product with a hard choice: if Japanese law requires that I get a Japanese version (from a function point of view) of a site when browsing from Japan, but the browser settings request French language, I may or may not have a French translation of the Japanese function to serve. I think a lot of the irregularity is just bad product management and engineering, but some of it is actually trying to deal with a hard problem.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Xophmeister 5y ago

What happens in countries that have multiple official languages that can't be determined geographically? I only assume such places exist, or there must be places on the borders where the accuracy of geo-IP and the demographics aren't clear-cut.

hericium 5y ago

When I'm abroad, visible under another country's IP address and my system's language is set to English, neither should be used to assign the language. What should be used is locale. Some users may have operating systems in language different to their own but probably more users have proper keyboard language set in their OS. Using IP address to assign the language is the dumbest choice possible but using OS language is not much better.

qwerty456127 5y ago

This always baffled me. Although English is not my native language I strongly dislike UIs being in any language but English. Every settings on my PCs says use English, all the apps are English versions, yet every time I find myself in another country Google uses its language to speak to me. I'm not sure I will even find how to switch the language to anything readable once I land in e.g. Japan or Armenia...

lukaesch 5y ago

The challenge for international platforms/websites are the legal/business requirements per region and it boils down to costs to streamline translations. Organizations split responsibilities by countries/regions. Local experts get hired to optimize content for their target markets. The back and forth between local subsidiaries/experts with centralized product development teams is more complex, slower and expensive. So you would rather create dedicated customer facing sites per region that are maintained by local teams who take care of location-specific differences (Netflix filtering, Google search results, etc.) The bigger the org gets the harder a streamlined multi-language (often also multi-currency) business model gets and hence companies opt to geo-location instead of using header lang. Probably, there are more points, but that’s what I have learned after building an international m-commerce platform that serves users in the EU, US and Mexico

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

A trick-ish that I've learned is to use Irish locale where possible (en-ie) , because that's a combination of English and Metric (the only sane international combination not to go wrong). Of course this still breaks when software tries location sniffing and puts me $elsewhere.

kozak 5y ago

This "Hey, you are from Ukraine, let us switch you to the Russian language" behavior I see in some places literally causes me PTSD. I got pissed off this way by Adobe just yesterday. Please don't do it people. I don't have the Russian language configured on any of my devices and in any of my accounts (and never had), they do it purely by location.

lukaesch 5y ago

d3k 5y ago

This is a common thing in software too I fear. I have Firefox on macOS. Everything is configured for US English, but I live in France. When I tell Firefox to save a page (or download something), the dialog prompts me to "Enregistrer sous..." (i.e.: "Save As..."). No idea why this happens.

dwheeler 5y ago

I agree, assuming the language based on where you happen to be (instead of your actual request) is completely wrong. There are websites that do it correctly. This website, which I maintain, correctly uses the browser setting: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org Perhaps what would be helpful would be to modify services that already evaluate websites to also determine if they switch locale correctly. If people see that there is an error, it's more likely to get fixed.

jve 5y ago

Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT included in home edition? Ridiculous. Luckily there was "Vistalizator" where you could install language pack of choice. Anyway, after multiple OS releases like that, they finally dropped that nonsense starting with Windows 8.

johnwalkr 5y ago
I have one windows PC that has heritage back to 2016, was originally installed in Japanese, then switched to English. It always had a Windows 10 pro license, and there is still in 2022 many places in the OS that only show up in Japanese. And many smaller and enterprise apps use region instead of language to set the language.
cesarb 5y ago
> Remember Microsoft Windows, which considered changing OS display language a enterprise/pro/ultimate feature, which was NOT included in home edition? I remember Microsoft Windows (and MS-DOS) having a hardcoded OS display language; if you installed a Brazilian edition of Microsoft Windows, all you got is Brazilian Portuguese, since the translations are hardcoded within each binary (but you could still change things like date format and keyboard layout), and if you wanted a different OS display language, you had to wipe and reinstall. I vaguely recall reading that this had changed starting with IIRC Windows Vista, which put the translations in separate files (instead of hardcoding them in the executables and DLLs).

VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago

For several years, my google pixel phones were returning a strange mixture of Arabic results. At the time, I was living in Texas, but I had taken some Arabic classes in college earlier that year, so I would often google sentences to see if they were grammatically correct. Then, I contacted google support at least five times and they were never able to figure it out. Even on another pixel, I was STILL getting Arabic results. After another year, I finally changed to Apple, and my google results are normal again.

jewel 5y ago

A workaround: To force search results in English when not signed in, go to https://www.google.com/en https://www.google.com/en. This adds a hl=en parameter to your queries. You can change the search provider URL in the browser to add the hl parameter.

InvaderFizz 5y ago
The irony is that I clicked that URL on my iPhone, signed in to Safari with everything set to US/English. About half the entries below the search bar(they now add news below) are in Spanish. My current location is Unknown if I scroll all the way to the bottom. Probably Google unsure of what to make of my whole house VPN where the desktop browsers use a fake location extension to automatically say yes to location requests but provide them with a static location in SoCal that matches the area of my IP block, but whenever I use google apps on my devices, they end up with GPS coordinates that place me deep within Mexico.

itvision 5y ago

This has been my pet peeve for ages. Google ignores the Accept-Language header on pretty much all of its websites and uses your location instead. And I fucking hate them for that.

malthaus 5y ago

My fav in this regard is Amazon: I can manually set a language in the settings, but those get at random times overwritten by my browser language setting. So why have it in the first place?

ajolly 5y ago
Amazon will occasionally randomly ignore my browser and my Amazon language setting forcing me to Spanish. (In Puerto Rico)

egberts1 5y ago

because … Google is anti-ethnocentric (as opposed to anti-ethnicentric)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pxue 5y ago

Been traveling in Mexico/Latin Am since the pandemic and this is so much more painful than I expected. I work on multiple projects as a consultant and so I often create a new browser profile for new clients (keep sessions, sign-ins etc separate). Every time i boot up a new profile, everything gets switched to Spanish, mexican results. Please Google, stahp.

thedougd 5y ago

Similarly, why do I encounter phone apps that ask me if I want F or C temps, 24 hour or 12 hour, and date formats? Use the locale, at least as a default. I do get the scenario where I may want to work in another set of units than my locale, but I find the locale is frequently just ignored by these apps.

theginger 5y ago

This article isn't looking at both sides. I am in an English speaking country and Google absolutely does honour my accept language header, eg is set to French I get french. I suspect that a non English speaker with an English language configured device in a non English speaking country is sufficiently more common than the other way round that they choose to make an exception and ignore en accept-language headers

Smithalicious 5y ago

I'm currently in France and I've resorted to just using duckduckgo. It's the same class of accessibility error as tying shipping address to website language, which I still see all the time, too.[0] When will we learn that people don't necessarily speak the native language of the place they reside? This isn't even uncommon, there's expats and tourists and foreign students and business travelers abound. [0] Framework required me to use the French language website to ship to France, for instance. My forum post suggesting this be changed got unceremoniously merged into some megathread and ignored.

bakhy 5y ago

Just BTW on the Netflix subtitles issue - I live in Germany, but I'm not German and generally prefer original audio on everything, typically with English subtitles. And some movies and series on Netflix will really only offer German subtitles, or, even worse, only German audio. No option to choose original. All movies that have such limited audio/subtitle options, when I play them, start with a title card of a German distributor, so I would believe Netflix on that one.

sokoloff 5y ago

There are definitely cases where I want “whatever is local” and others where “whatever my normal default is”. If I’m getting driving directions in a place where the car and road signs are in kilometers, I probably want my directions in kilometers as well, even if my default is stupid-units.

donatj 5y ago

Years ago I built a language system that parsed Accept-Lang and compared your preferences to what we had available. There was also a drop down at the bottom of the page to manually override. I thought it worked really slick, but we got complaints. The majority of our users were English speaking despite their Accept-Lang preferences and expected us to serve in English. We switched to just default English with the dropdown there if you want something else. Made me a little sad.

chrisdbanks 5y ago

For me, whichever you choose, you should make it easy for the user to change the language. Living in Spain as an English speaker I often end up on a Spanish version with no obvious way to change to English. That is the real sin.

lokar 5y ago

The reason is straight forward. They have data that shows most people outside the US have the setting wrong. For the .com (American!) domain the default is English. For each country specific site the default is the primary local language. You can change the default via a cookie.

account42 5y ago
> For the .com (American!) domain the default is English. If only. The geolocation talked about here is taking place on the .com domain. Worse, even if you manage to switch it to english (they have been hiding that link more and more) it will still use geolocation to push search results in the "local" language.

Neil44 5y ago

It’s a pain in the ass, I have a client who’s WAN exits in Swizerland so you have to manually set everything to correct locale, not just Google all kinds of stuff.

rjmunro 5y ago

I think there are 2 valid reasons: 1. Sometimes for legal or practical reasons other than language, the site needs to be different in different places, e.g. terms and conditions, cookie popups, prices legally required to include tax etc. These have to be based on the users location. 2. Users don't set their browser language correctly. The options to change are hidden where no one looks and hard to understand - you an allow multiple languages and set a preferred order for them. I think this was common years ago, but is probably no so much the case now - it will default to the system language.

pelorat 5y ago

They do it because they want you to always be logged in to your Google account. If you're logged in you can simply change your language settings there.

brodo 5y ago

If you search for an english book title on Amazon.de it gets auto-translated to german. I first saw this a couple of weeks ago and it was super confusing. Chances are the search results will be nonsense or empty.

Mikeb85 5y ago

I really wish you could specify the search language or internationalisation. Sometimes I search in English, French, Italian, Czech or Ukrainian, I also split time between Canada, France and Czech Republic, can read all these languages well enough to want contextual results for each, but inevitably I still get results focused only on my actual location which is slightly infuriating...

unreal37 5y ago

This is currently affecting me. Google serves me results in Portuguese. The results are poor for me, because I can't read the language. The suggested websites are in Portuguese. And there's no way around this? It's crazy!

nelgaard 5y ago

At least if you use Tor Browser, you will learn a few words in just about every language.

someelephant 5y ago

google flights using your profile language preference but then listing all flights in local currency :(

HALtheWise 5y ago

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?

netsharc 5y ago
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"

amacneil 5y ago

I have not had a chance to test this yet, but apparently setting your locale to en-CA (rather than en-US) solves the problem, since Google no longer assumes you're using default language settings. Anyone have success with this?

asiachick 5y ago

what's failing for me, I want result in Japanese but google thinks I want Chinese. I'm not in China or Japan but Chinese is not in my language preferences. Switching to google.co.jp didn't help.

antematerija 5y ago

You can set language to be anything you want regardless of location. E.g. on mobile just scroll to bottom of fist page and pick different language. E.g. on desktop just go to settings and pick language. I'm pretty sure this works awesome since I've used this all my life. I would expect power users to look for simple solution instead of ranting. Who the hell are you guys if you can't find language settings!!!

slig 5y ago
It doesn't work. That's the point.
- antematerija 5y ago
  It does work. I use this my entire life. Please read my comment. I'm talking about language settings on Google and not browser settings. Somehow people believe that a multi trillion dollar company hasn't ran live experiments on this. The default settings are adapted so the probability of correct language for people who can't find language settings is maximized. Guys, please use common sense. The alternative is to believe that Google engineers are either not educated or don't know ab testing.

Tagbert 5y ago

Default is one thing, but why is there not an obvious and easy way for users to override the language chosen by Google and make that selection permanent? Not giving users control is a terrible user experience.

elif 5y ago

aside: designers, please never do this mouseover fill the window js... this is painful

bjoli 5y ago

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.

mcswell 5y ago

"Because we're Google, we know better than you."

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.ph/zHE8R https://archive.ph/zHE8R http://web.archive.org/web/20220311170532/https://smaller.fish/posts/language http://web.archive.org/web/20220311170532/https://smaller.fi...

etchalon 5y ago

This is super non-interesting. But every jurisdiction has unique laws, company policies, release schedules, etc. So, for every jurisdiction, you have unique official text. The unique official text will always be available in the majority languages of the jurisdiction. The people who work in the jurisdiction speak it, and write in it, and can easily generate it. Non-majority languages require translators. Hiring people. Workflows. Approvals, etc. So it's easier to go off location, because then I know you're reading the right official text, and if you can't read the official text in the native language, it's on you to translate. This gets harder the bigger the company, especially in cases where the "company" is a bunch of independent subsidiaries.

richardfey 5y ago

eBay is another big offender, you need to change your physical address or the TLD.

traspler 5y ago

The Netflix thing makes me so angry sometimes. They have the show, the title, description, episode titles and descriptions are all localized to my language of choice (English), but when I actually start watching I can only select French or Original Dub & French Sub.

jbj 5y ago

Same annoyance since I remember learning about the internet, and realizing the language for computers with the least friction is US english. One thing I found extremely bizare is that `wget` on my work computer gives status and error messages in my local language. I have no clue how it ended up like this, but I am suspecting it is due to the usage of a local mirror of macports.

hardwaresofton 5y ago

Well, I got banned from google ads for using an American credit card because they auto set my language to japan and charged in Yen. Absolutely ridiculous, and now there’s seemingly no recourse.

delecti 5y ago

I recently noticed this while browsing their device store from Germany. I couldn't get to the US shop no matter what I tried changing. There's a language and locale query parameter in the URL, but it will forcibly redirect you back if you try to change it. I'm not sure what it's even there for.

thayne 5y ago

> The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US maybe browser should default to sending no value or a special "default" value for Accept-Language. So that sites can use location if it is the default, but if you explicitly configure your browser to use en-US, then it will respect that.

lern_too_spel 5y ago

Because Google's PMs think they know better than their users and are so arrogant in this belief that they won't even bother running an AB test.

rapjr9 5y ago

My guess is that large companies may be required to switch to the geolocated national language preferences of a countries government so that a nation preserves its identity. If you are in the USA and you can switch your language preference to the UK your mindset starts to trend towards UK thinking. Region locks on DVD's and Blu-Ray disks may have a similar purpose, to preserve local culture. This seems both good and bad, bad in that it discourages cross-cultural exposure and thinking, and good in that it makes the world richer because cultural diversity encourages many different approaches to life which may benefit everyone whenever cultures do mix, sort of a redundancy of operating systems so to speak.

powerapple 5y ago

google is super annoying on this. And sometimes it is just hard to change language, especially on mobile.

bartimus 5y ago

Because Google wants to put you in contact with localized businesses and their advertising.

felber 5y ago

I am able to bypass this by adding a second language to my browser (e.g. I have en-US AND something else). Theory: en-US is the default so Google just ignores it.