So after reading through all of the comments people have left here and through some of the related links people have posted, it really sounds that most of the f

So after reading through all of the comments people have left here and through some of the related links people have posted, it really sounds that most of the folks who think this is a bad idea are people who travel a lot or are above the norm in regards to tech. Face it, if you're reading HN, you're probably a geek in one form or another. But the thing is, most people aren't. They want to go to a service and have it work for them. To talk about Google specifically, remember for a second that this is a company that is insanely driven by numbers. Remember that thing a few months ago where their lead UI guy quit because they did A/B testing on 30 different colors of blue? I can't confirm, of course, but I would put a lot of money on Google having spent a lot of time doing testing on language localization based across a lot of different parameters including user agent, geo IP, etc. And if they're using IP's, there's probably a good reason why they do. I'll also admit that I'm an American English speaker. I can't speak a second language, but I can read Spanish(slowly) and I understand a bit of Haitian Creole if spoken slowly. The only time I've ever been out of the U.S. is to Montreal 10 years ago on vacation. The site that pisses me off the most at the moment is ups.com. They never remember the language I select(English) and their UX is a freaking pile of crap. Every time I go their site, I get the same cramped little box where I have to pick a language. They are a prime candidate to use geo-IP detection given their global business, and yet they don't. I contrast them to Google because they're both global companies, but while Google has put millions of dollars into testing their products, UPS looks like they hired some interns 5 years ago to design their site and haven't updated it since.