10 ms·

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 sa

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!

bhrgunatha 5y ago
I wrote a script for ViolentMonkey to force "hl=en" to appear in the query string for all google services which has been the most reliable way for me to overcome the problem. It doesn't work for some services though but aside from signing in to google there's nothing else I can do. I suspect they'll shut that down at some point too.
sn41 5y ago
Google and other internationalisation efforts are absolutely a mess in India. India has many states based on languages - 22 listed languages - essentially each state has its own language and its own script, except in the Hindi belt. Its not fun to be a North Indian to work in the South or vice versa- you may often be served a page in a script you cannot decipher fast enough or read at all.
estaseuropano 5y ago
Well, try living in a country with two or more official languages. What you get is basically a random language. Anyone in those places suffers from such bad design choices.
richardfey 5y ago
> Google is the most prominent offender. If I’m signed in to my browser profile in Chrome, the search engine is served in English. No problem. The moment I try to access it from incognito, or Firefox, however, I get the Spanish language version of Google. What if it's a dark pattern to have more people signed in?
kzrdude 5y ago
I just hate that google makes me more ignorant that I want to be. I speak multiple languages. Nothing fancy, just related ones. I want google to search in all the languages I use and know, and not arbitrarily filter my internet into a location-specific bubble.
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.
darkerside 5y ago
You know exactly how to get to Google in English though, don't you? A new person picking up a misconfigured laptop seems much more likely to get lost than a temporary visitor to another country.
- justinmayer 5y ago
  That's not the point. People should not be forced to switch from one language to another, multiple times, for every site they visit, when in a country that speaks a different language than the one for which their computer is configured.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Your justification works for both sides. You shouldn't have to change this setting multiple times when you're in a country that speaks (well, writes, really) a different language than your computer is configured for. You would like the web to respect your configuration. On the otherhand, the general public shouldn't have to change this setting multiple times when they're in a country that writes a different language than their computers are configured for. They would like the web to respect their location. Even though they imported a computer configured for English and don't know how to (or don't want to) configure the language options for the whole computer or the browser. If language settings were easily and often set, they'd be respected more; but if there's a good chance people are more likely to want a local language than what the computer thinks they want, then ignoring the preferences is the right thing for most users. Even if it's infuriating for those it missed. When I had the fortune of working on multi-language sites, I would try to have each site have their own urls, but some places insisted on one url, multiple languages. Trying to make a reasonable initial language decision and then a language picker with a cookie was the best I could do.
- criddell 5y ago
  Google is built entirely upon the idea that they know their users and can therefore serve effective advertisements to them. The idea that they don't know what language their user wants seems absurd.
silvestrov 5y ago
Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translations are). These users will still want Google to return results in their native language. There is a much much larger number of users like this than travellers from USA. One thing that bothers me a lot with US websites is that they always assume English language means 12-hour clock. Apple has learned the above over time: it is much easier today to get a Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks.
- vezycash 5y ago
  > "The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! I have this issue with Microsoft. The national language in my country is English. However, Microsoft's store defaults to a local language that I don't speak every single time. My IP is also not from a part of the country that speaks that language either.
- quitit 5y ago
  Unfortunately the problem exists in both directions. I run my setup entirely in English and Google will still try to squeeze in the local non-english language. Confusingly Google will also write some sentences half in english and half in the local language. E.g. "Google is also available in: <insert foreign language here>" (rather than the full sentence being in the foreign language. It's the kind of attention to detail that I've become accustomed to from them
  - jobigoud 5y ago
    > E.g. "Google is also available in: <insert foreign language here>" This specific one might be on purpose to avoid translating language names. If you land in page entirely in Chinese but you see the word "English" in Latin characters under a link, you can click it to escape. But if it's itself in Chinese you'll never find it. I do the same in applications, have a menu for languages but don't translate language names, if you change language by mistake you can always find your way back.
miskin 5y ago
This IP based personalisation is such a pain especially if you work remotely and need to use VPN to connect to company network that happens to be based in different country. Worst thing is that Google knows very well who am I (due to me being logged in to GMail), knows what language I use, but still serves me completely wrong results only because my IP is suddenly from different country.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> 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. But then why doesn't Google just make it easier to set that setting? Honestly, when I'm in another country, I don't get too upset that Google results are in another language, I just get upset that I can't seem to find a simple way to change it. Even then I'm probably giving Google too much of a pass, because they know everything about me. This happens even when I'm logged into Chrome. If they're able to target hyper-personalized ads to me, surely they know I'm an English speaker even when I'm in Mexico.
- justinmayer 5y ago
  Google's answer to this problem is, "Just log in! Then we will always know what language you prefer." So Google doesn't make it easier to change that setting because they want you to be logged in all the time so they can track you better.
  - ivirshup 5y ago
    Logging in does not completley solve this with google. A number of pages languages are still IP based.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    It doesn't always work. When I'm in Spain, with my Google account configured to use English, Youtube search returns videos in Spanish (even though the Youtube interface is displayed in English).
  - i80and 5y ago
    I had a fascinating issue with Google. I am a monolingual English speaker. I visited Iceland, and as happens, Google started serving UIs in Icelandic even while I was logged in. What was interesting was this continued for weeks after returning to my home country. There was no setting I could find to go back to English; I got good at the specific Icelandic keywords I needed to navigate the UI. Then without any ceremony, things suddenly reverted back to English.
RF_Savage 5y ago
At least it's not as bad as Aliexpress. They have randomly served me the page in Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Portugese, Thai, German and Romanian. The only good thing is that the menu to change back to english is less hidden nowdays. Yet to see it in my native Finnish. And all these without a VPN and from a domestic consumer ISP connection.
- enedil 5y ago
  I can tell you, that I saw my native Polish, and I wish I didn't. The automatic translation is so bad, that I automatically rush to switch to English.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Aliexpress also doesn’t allow me to use my normal email, I think they have a whitelist of known email provider domains or something like that. It’s a pretty atrocious website all around.
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  I thought Aliexpress was just trying to subtly say "FU, we're the new dominant culture now" to western Europeans by randomly switching to Chinese like 25% of the time... Guess they just have one of the buggiest locale detections in the world :))) EDIT+: ...or maybe too many Chinese users leave their proxy/VPN on when using their site too
- oblio 5y ago
  > Romanian They figured out that "la naiba" is better than "perkele" :-p
usrusr 5y ago
The ad market for lang=x, location=y must be abysmally small, even for tourist destinations. When you pretend that you didn't notice that the user is not a local you can still bill the impression and most importantly the occasional accidental click as a "mission accomplished".
- Someone 5y ago
  The fraction of site visitors who are tourists may be low, but I expect it to be a segment with relatively more money that also is in the mood to spend on certain things. Looks like an audience google can charge more for.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
It's a mistake a lot of companies make. They are so proud of their ability to lookup a country from an ip address that they forget that there are hundreds of millions of migrants living on this planet who probably speak something else. Not to mention tourists, business travelers, etc. I'm a non German living in Germany, I have to deal with this all the time. It's a combination of corporate stupidity, rookie & clueless product management, and just indifference. It's wrong every time. No buts. No ifs. No exceptions. Use browser and OS settings, always. Anything else is a mistake that will cost you users and business.
- overkalix 5y ago
  There are also plenty of countries with multiple official languages.
  - CaptainZapp 5y ago
    Well configured web sites in such countries usually offer a choice of (major) languages on the landing page. See https://www.apple.com/ch/ https://www.apple.com/ch/ (you can also type apple.ch) for an example.
    - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
      It gives me a choice to choose between French and German. Where’s Italian? Apple is rarely a good example of giving user a choice.
- alexdumitru 5y ago
  And they're wrong. I'm in Romania, but I use everything in English. Google is mostly in English, but sometimes decides to switch back to Romanian. Pretty decent , right? Until it decides to switch to Hungarian or German for whatever reason, two languages I have nothing do to with.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
> 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. If you're right and they're following a numbers-game, Google's reasoning could only make the tiniest bit of sense if they were a disruptive minor player facing stiff competition. As it stands though, however frustrated a native speaker with a misconfigured browser may become, they're not going to flock to an alternative service. Plus, I would argue that a user that is not technically competent enough to change their own browser's language preference is the user least likely to even know where to look for alternatives to Google's services. This is all the worst considering that a user whose browser is configured for the wrong language only needs to change their settings once. However, a user who happens to physically be in the wrong place for their language does not have the luxury of fixing the problem, short of using a VPN or travelling to a location that Google has decided speaks their language.
ascar 5y ago
In general I totally agree with your sentiment. As you seem quite knowledgeable in the subject I want to nitpick your choice of words in your closing statement. > any company that uses geo-IP location to serve me pages specific to that locale A company should serve you content based on your geographic location. That's exactly what "localization" is for. E.g. the content should be adapted to local regulations and law whenever necessary and it makes total sense to do that based on the visitors physical location and geo-IP is often the best approximator you have for that. What should be adapted to user's choice is language.
- justinmayer 5y ago
  I firmly disagree with all of the above. If a site absolutely needs to know where I am in that moment, they can ask me, and I will decide where I am for the purposes of that particular site. To pick one of a myriad of examples, I often buy software, books, etc. via the web. I don't need sites to assume I want to pay in Euro just because my IP address in that moment happens to be associated with a European IP address block. Paying with my home currency is often much easier. I should not be forced to use a VPN just to avoid this silliness. I understand where you are coming from, but using IP addresses to determine what "locale" to use is simply not a good practice, and not just for language determination.
  - ascar 5y ago
    Well, your example will be in many cases against the law. Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch. A website isn't allowed to choose which VAT to charge and who they owe it to. In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images). There are many more examples like that and the applicable law is usually based on your physical location at that point in time (i.e. the jurisdiction you are in). While I agree IP isn't the best choice, it is often the best available and letting the user just choose these things is in many instances simply illegal.
    - kps 5y ago
      My ISP covers two jurisdictions with different primary languages. IP geolocation often places me in the wrong one.
zmb_ 5y ago
The VPN exit point for the big tech company I work in Europe for seems to be in Poland for whatever reason. I had to switch to duckduckgo to not be served search results in Polish all the time.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Trying to guess the user's language is ok as long as the user has some way to override your guess. DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change between your local language and English. That's great, because depending on the search you want, it may be better done on either language. The Microsoft site uses your language header on their .Net documentation. That is very bad because no matter what your browser says you prefer, the only document with any reasonable quality is the English one. There is a language switcher that takes some 20 seconds to use (hurrah, javascript!) and they don't bother to save for your next access. That makes the site barely usable instead of completely useless. What I don't get is, with the amount of information Google makes sure to collect about me, how does it not know that I prefer results not on my main language and verbatim search terms? That is even after I tell them that on their settings.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  > DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change between your local language and English. That's great, because depending on the search you want, it may be better done on either language. DDG also has local and global search that you can switch, without switching the language of the site (so if I do a search with !ddgde I get German results but the DDG interface is still in English). Kagi does the same thing with !reg (for regional)
- debugnik 5y ago
  > There is a language switcher that takes some 20 seconds to use They've finally added back the "Read in English" button they removed years ago for some dumb reason when they migrated the .NET docs to a new domain.
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.
sokz 5y ago
I have faced the problem in steroids in India, where there are 22 scheduled languages. While I can read 3 local languages, one cannot be expected to know every single language in the general area. Keeping my computers in English doesn't help, changing the languages to the one that I can actually read doesn't help. It is sad that Google has harvested enough data about me to make a highly accurate profile of mine but can't be arsed to make usage of their products a little convenient for me by just respecting my language settings.
nyuszika7h 5y ago
Indeed, I once read a story that said there are a lot of misconfigured computers specifically in Japan, so that's why they ignore `Accept-Language` if it's set to English. But yes, this is incredibly frustrating for power users like me who are fluent in English and prefer not to deal with half-baked translations.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lazide 5y ago
Having been involving in some internal projects and done the data analysis (not in Search, other areas), your guess is correct - far more people get (clearly) wrong results if you serve what the browser is asking for due to mis configuration. It’s easy to tell due to differences in various conversion metrics and huge increases in clicks to language change buttons. It drove me crazy too before I saw the data. Geo-IP, while not awesome for exactly the scenario you are describing, is more predictable since it gives a set of baseline language/settings that are ‘right’ based on norms in the area, and people know how to navigate out of generally if they’re not the ‘baseline’ user there. (An English speaker in Japan pretty quickly needs to know how to switch languages or learn Japanese or they aren’t going to be able to even navigate the subway/buy tickets for instance!) Many of the browser based settings get people stuck, especially since most large websites do the same geoip thing now. It does make it awkward for folks not doing ‘the norm’ in their area, or who have an IP improperly categorized, but statistically they aren’t as common and they figure out how to handle it usually.
xmodem 5y ago
Can I add a category for your wall of shame? Services that couple language and location, so that even though they have done the work of having an English localization, it's not available in my location. Financial services and airlines are the worst offenders. SAS, Degiro, Amazon off the top of my head all do this. Degiro has the added bonus of totally breaking under Google Translate so I went to the trouble of using a browser extension to rewrite the request for their localisation strings file to fetch the English version. I'm sure there are some legal disclaimers that are missing here and there but it works fine.
luizfelberti 5y ago
I don't even care that much about the IP vs System Language part of it tbh, what REALLY pisses me off is that despite having configured my Google Account to only show me english results, it will serve me Portuguese search results just because I live in Brazil. That is truly maddening
mattnewton 5y ago
I think this is the answer ('misconfigured' local machines). For mobile phones at least, my understanding is that many bilingual people will set their phone up as American English because they believe the phone experience will be better, but then search primarily in their native language (like Hindi for example). Having location trump the language settings here makes more sense- however it should be configurable for logged in users. If it's not that's madness.
xenomachina 5y ago
I worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US, so Google effectively treats an Accept-Language of en-US as a no-op, and then it falls through to location-based. (I don't agree with this rationale, and said as much, but there you have it.) Note that other values for Accept-Language are not ignored. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard some people say that setting their language to en-GB or en-CA works well. You can also use &hl=en-US, which always takes precedence.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  en-NL worked perfectly, thanks for this tip!
  - jannes 5y ago
    This will make your browser very fingerprintable because it’s very uncommon.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      I have an extension to override the locale per-site.
- justinmayer 5y ago
  Thank you for effectively confirming what I long suspected. Much appreciated.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  And once a rationale like this has become part of company culture for >20 years, there is almost no way it is ever changing.
- ehPReth 5y ago
  Interesting! Thanks :) One sad thing is localization for Canada is kind of broken for a lot of platforms it seems? For a lot of people that I help having their locale has Canada seems to usually base it off of United Kingdom stuff including setting paper size as A4(!) Which… I wish we used but unfortunately we don’t - we use the US paper system. this causes problems with stricter printers and printing and also just manufacturing stuff like PDFs
itronitron 5y ago
I think they do this to force people to login to their Google account (in order to change the language setting.)
ouid 5y ago
I mean, what's actually stupid here is that there isn't any way to configure this properly. It's wild that the default behavior is the only behavior. I'm not even sure I believe it.
chucke 5y ago
Browser install wizards already configure the default chosen language to the OS language, which should already be the preferred language, so I'd be very surprised if that was the reason they never bothered to fix this behaviour. My theory is that yes, they don't lose business because of this so why fix it, but mostly because the most valuable country-markets in the world tend to be monolingual, and the US is the most profitable of them all. And everyone uses Google despite of this because well, what else?
account42 5y ago
> native speakers with misconfigured computing environments How many of those are "misconfigured" and how many are set to en-US because that's the language they want for their computer.

bhrgunatha 5y ago

I wrote a script for ViolentMonkey to force "hl=en" to appear in the query string for all google services which has been the most reliable way for me to overcome the problem. It doesn't work for some services though but aside from signing in to google there's nothing else I can do. I suspect they'll shut that down at some point too.

sn41 5y ago

Google and other internationalisation efforts are absolutely a mess in India. India has many states based on languages - 22 listed languages - essentially each state has its own language and its own script, except in the Hindi belt. Its not fun to be a North Indian to work in the South or vice versa- you may often be served a page in a script you cannot decipher fast enough or read at all.

estaseuropano 5y ago

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

richardfey 5y ago

> Google is the most prominent offender. If I’m signed in to my browser profile in Chrome, the search engine is served in English. No problem. The moment I try to access it from incognito, or Firefox, however, I get the Spanish language version of Google. What if it's a dark pattern to have more people signed in?

kzrdude 5y ago

I just hate that google makes me more ignorant that I want to be. I speak multiple languages. Nothing fancy, just related ones. I want google to search in all the languages I use and know, and not arbitrarily filter my internet into a location-specific bubble.

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.

darkerside 5y ago

You know exactly how to get to Google in English though, don't you? A new person picking up a misconfigured laptop seems much more likely to get lost than a temporary visitor to another country.

justinmayer 5y ago
That's not the point. People should not be forced to switch from one language to another, multiple times, for every site they visit, when in a country that speaks a different language than the one for which their computer is configured.
- toast0 5y ago
  Your justification works for both sides. You shouldn't have to change this setting multiple times when you're in a country that speaks (well, writes, really) a different language than your computer is configured for. You would like the web to respect your configuration. On the otherhand, the general public shouldn't have to change this setting multiple times when they're in a country that writes a different language than their computers are configured for. They would like the web to respect their location. Even though they imported a computer configured for English and don't know how to (or don't want to) configure the language options for the whole computer or the browser. If language settings were easily and often set, they'd be respected more; but if there's a good chance people are more likely to want a local language than what the computer thinks they want, then ignoring the preferences is the right thing for most users. Even if it's infuriating for those it missed. When I had the fortune of working on multi-language sites, I would try to have each site have their own urls, but some places insisted on one url, multiple languages. Trying to make a reasonable initial language decision and then a language picker with a cookie was the best I could do.
criddell 5y ago
Google is built entirely upon the idea that they know their users and can therefore serve effective advertisements to them. The idea that they don't know what language their user wants seems absurd.

silvestrov 5y ago

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translations are). These users will still want Google to return results in their native language. There is a much much larger number of users like this than travellers from USA. One thing that bothers me a lot with US websites is that they always assume English language means 12-hour clock. Apple has learned the above over time: it is much easier today to get a Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks.

vezycash 5y ago
> "The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! I have this issue with Microsoft. The national language in my country is English. However, Microsoft's store defaults to a local language that I don't speak every single time. My IP is also not from a part of the country that speaks that language either.
quitit 5y ago
Unfortunately the problem exists in both directions. I run my setup entirely in English and Google will still try to squeeze in the local non-english language. Confusingly Google will also write some sentences half in english and half in the local language. E.g. "Google is also available in: <insert foreign language here>" (rather than the full sentence being in the foreign language. It's the kind of attention to detail that I've become accustomed to from them
- jobigoud 5y ago
  > E.g. "Google is also available in: <insert foreign language here>" This specific one might be on purpose to avoid translating language names. If you land in page entirely in Chinese but you see the word "English" in Latin characters under a link, you can click it to escape. But if it's itself in Chinese you'll never find it. I do the same in applications, have a menu for languages but don't translate language names, if you change language by mistake you can always find your way back.

miskin 5y ago

This IP based personalisation is such a pain especially if you work remotely and need to use VPN to connect to company network that happens to be based in different country. Worst thing is that Google knows very well who am I (due to me being logged in to GMail), knows what language I use, but still serves me completely wrong results only because my IP is suddenly from different country.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> 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. But then why doesn't Google just make it easier to set that setting? Honestly, when I'm in another country, I don't get too upset that Google results are in another language, I just get upset that I can't seem to find a simple way to change it. Even then I'm probably giving Google too much of a pass, because they know everything about me. This happens even when I'm logged into Chrome. If they're able to target hyper-personalized ads to me, surely they know I'm an English speaker even when I'm in Mexico.

justinmayer 5y ago
Google's answer to this problem is, "Just log in! Then we will always know what language you prefer." So Google doesn't make it easier to change that setting because they want you to be logged in all the time so they can track you better.
- ivirshup 5y ago
  Logging in does not completley solve this with google. A number of pages languages are still IP based.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  It doesn't always work. When I'm in Spain, with my Google account configured to use English, Youtube search returns videos in Spanish (even though the Youtube interface is displayed in English).
- i80and 5y ago
  I had a fascinating issue with Google. I am a monolingual English speaker. I visited Iceland, and as happens, Google started serving UIs in Icelandic even while I was logged in. What was interesting was this continued for weeks after returning to my home country. There was no setting I could find to go back to English; I got good at the specific Icelandic keywords I needed to navigate the UI. Then without any ceremony, things suddenly reverted back to English.

RF_Savage 5y ago

At least it's not as bad as Aliexpress. They have randomly served me the page in Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Portugese, Thai, German and Romanian. The only good thing is that the menu to change back to english is less hidden nowdays. Yet to see it in my native Finnish. And all these without a VPN and from a domestic consumer ISP connection.

enedil 5y ago
I can tell you, that I saw my native Polish, and I wish I didn't. The automatic translation is so bad, that I automatically rush to switch to English.
Semaphor 5y ago
Aliexpress also doesn’t allow me to use my normal email, I think they have a whitelist of known email provider domains or something like that. It’s a pretty atrocious website all around.
catchclose8919 5y ago
I thought Aliexpress was just trying to subtly say "FU, we're the new dominant culture now" to western Europeans by randomly switching to Chinese like 25% of the time... Guess they just have one of the buggiest locale detections in the world :))) EDIT+: ...or maybe too many Chinese users leave their proxy/VPN on when using their site too
oblio 5y ago
> Romanian They figured out that "la naiba" is better than "perkele" :-p

usrusr 5y ago

The ad market for lang=x, location=y must be abysmally small, even for tourist destinations. When you pretend that you didn't notice that the user is not a local you can still bill the impression and most importantly the occasional accidental click as a "mission accomplished".

Someone 5y ago
The fraction of site visitors who are tourists may be low, but I expect it to be a segment with relatively more money that also is in the mood to spend on certain things. Looks like an audience google can charge more for.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

It's a mistake a lot of companies make. They are so proud of their ability to lookup a country from an ip address that they forget that there are hundreds of millions of migrants living on this planet who probably speak something else. Not to mention tourists, business travelers, etc. I'm a non German living in Germany, I have to deal with this all the time. It's a combination of corporate stupidity, rookie & clueless product management, and just indifference. It's wrong every time. No buts. No ifs. No exceptions. Use browser and OS settings, always. Anything else is a mistake that will cost you users and business.

overkalix 5y ago
There are also plenty of countries with multiple official languages.
- CaptainZapp 5y ago
  Well configured web sites in such countries usually offer a choice of (major) languages on the landing page. See https://www.apple.com/ch/ https://www.apple.com/ch/ (you can also type apple.ch) for an example.
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    It gives me a choice to choose between French and German. Where’s Italian? Apple is rarely a good example of giving user a choice.
alexdumitru 5y ago
And they're wrong. I'm in Romania, but I use everything in English. Google is mostly in English, but sometimes decides to switch back to Romanian. Pretty decent , right? Until it decides to switch to Hungarian or German for whatever reason, two languages I have nothing do to with.

Mordisquitos 5y ago

> 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. If you're right and they're following a numbers-game, Google's reasoning could only make the tiniest bit of sense if they were a disruptive minor player facing stiff competition. As it stands though, however frustrated a native speaker with a misconfigured browser may become, they're not going to flock to an alternative service. Plus, I would argue that a user that is not technically competent enough to change their own browser's language preference is the user least likely to even know where to look for alternatives to Google's services. This is all the worst considering that a user whose browser is configured for the wrong language only needs to change their settings once. However, a user who happens to physically be in the wrong place for their language does not have the luxury of fixing the problem, short of using a VPN or travelling to a location that Google has decided speaks their language.

ascar 5y ago

In general I totally agree with your sentiment. As you seem quite knowledgeable in the subject I want to nitpick your choice of words in your closing statement. > any company that uses geo-IP location to serve me pages specific to that locale A company should serve you content based on your geographic location. That's exactly what "localization" is for. E.g. the content should be adapted to local regulations and law whenever necessary and it makes total sense to do that based on the visitors physical location and geo-IP is often the best approximator you have for that. What should be adapted to user's choice is language.

justinmayer 5y ago
I firmly disagree with all of the above. If a site absolutely needs to know where I am in that moment, they can ask me, and I will decide where I am for the purposes of that particular site. To pick one of a myriad of examples, I often buy software, books, etc. via the web. I don't need sites to assume I want to pay in Euro just because my IP address in that moment happens to be associated with a European IP address block. Paying with my home currency is often much easier. I should not be forced to use a VPN just to avoid this silliness. I understand where you are coming from, but using IP addresses to determine what "locale" to use is simply not a good practice, and not just for language determination.
- ascar 5y ago
  Well, your example will be in many cases against the law. Netflix isn't allowed to let me choose which countries catalogue I want to watch. A website isn't allowed to choose which VAT to charge and who they owe it to. In an Arabic country you might not be allowed to serve images of women in swimwear (or other revealing images). There are many more examples like that and the applicable law is usually based on your physical location at that point in time (i.e. the jurisdiction you are in). While I agree IP isn't the best choice, it is often the best available and letting the user just choose these things is in many instances simply illegal.
  - kps 5y ago
    My ISP covers two jurisdictions with different primary languages. IP geolocation often places me in the wrong one.

zmb_ 5y ago

The VPN exit point for the big tech company I work in Europe for seems to be in Poland for whatever reason. I had to switch to duckduckgo to not be served search results in Polish all the time.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Trying to guess the user's language is ok as long as the user has some way to override your guess. DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change between your local language and English. That's great, because depending on the search you want, it may be better done on either language. The Microsoft site uses your language header on their .Net documentation. That is very bad because no matter what your browser says you prefer, the only document with any reasonable quality is the English one. There is a language switcher that takes some 20 seconds to use (hurrah, javascript!) and they don't bother to save for your next access. That makes the site barely usable instead of completely useless. What I don't get is, with the amount of information Google makes sure to collect about me, how does it not know that I prefer results not on my main language and verbatim search terms? That is even after I tell them that on their settings.

Semaphor 5y ago
> DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change between your local language and English. That's great, because depending on the search you want, it may be better done on either language. DDG also has local and global search that you can switch, without switching the language of the site (so if I do a search with !ddgde I get German results but the DDG interface is still in English). Kagi does the same thing with !reg (for regional)
debugnik 5y ago
> There is a language switcher that takes some 20 seconds to use They've finally added back the "Read in English" button they removed years ago for some dumb reason when they migrated the .NET docs to a new domain.

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.

sokz 5y ago

I have faced the problem in steroids in India, where there are 22 scheduled languages. While I can read 3 local languages, one cannot be expected to know every single language in the general area. Keeping my computers in English doesn't help, changing the languages to the one that I can actually read doesn't help. It is sad that Google has harvested enough data about me to make a highly accurate profile of mine but can't be arsed to make usage of their products a little convenient for me by just respecting my language settings.

nyuszika7h 5y ago

Indeed, I once read a story that said there are a lot of misconfigured computers specifically in Japan, so that's why they ignore `Accept-Language` if it's set to English. But yes, this is incredibly frustrating for power users like me who are fluent in English and prefer not to deal with half-baked translations.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lazide 5y ago

Having been involving in some internal projects and done the data analysis (not in Search, other areas), your guess is correct - far more people get (clearly) wrong results if you serve what the browser is asking for due to mis configuration. It’s easy to tell due to differences in various conversion metrics and huge increases in clicks to language change buttons. It drove me crazy too before I saw the data. Geo-IP, while not awesome for exactly the scenario you are describing, is more predictable since it gives a set of baseline language/settings that are ‘right’ based on norms in the area, and people know how to navigate out of generally if they’re not the ‘baseline’ user there. (An English speaker in Japan pretty quickly needs to know how to switch languages or learn Japanese or they aren’t going to be able to even navigate the subway/buy tickets for instance!) Many of the browser based settings get people stuck, especially since most large websites do the same geoip thing now. It does make it awkward for folks not doing ‘the norm’ in their area, or who have an IP improperly categorized, but statistically they aren’t as common and they figure out how to handle it usually.

xmodem 5y ago

Can I add a category for your wall of shame? Services that couple language and location, so that even though they have done the work of having an English localization, it's not available in my location. Financial services and airlines are the worst offenders. SAS, Degiro, Amazon off the top of my head all do this. Degiro has the added bonus of totally breaking under Google Translate so I went to the trouble of using a browser extension to rewrite the request for their localisation strings file to fetch the English version. I'm sure there are some legal disclaimers that are missing here and there but it works fine.

luizfelberti 5y ago

I don't even care that much about the IP vs System Language part of it tbh, what REALLY pisses me off is that despite having configured my Google Account to only show me english results, it will serve me Portuguese search results just because I live in Brazil. That is truly maddening

mattnewton 5y ago

I think this is the answer ('misconfigured' local machines). For mobile phones at least, my understanding is that many bilingual people will set their phone up as American English because they believe the phone experience will be better, but then search primarily in their native language (like Hindi for example). Having location trump the language settings here makes more sense- however it should be configurable for logged in users. If it's not that's madness.

xenomachina 5y ago

I worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US, so Google effectively treats an Accept-Language of en-US as a no-op, and then it falls through to location-based. (I don't agree with this rationale, and said as much, but there you have it.) Note that other values for Accept-Language are not ignored. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard some people say that setting their language to en-GB or en-CA works well. You can also use &hl=en-US, which always takes precedence.

withinboredom 5y ago
en-NL worked perfectly, thanks for this tip!
- jannes 5y ago
  This will make your browser very fingerprintable because it’s very uncommon.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    I have an extension to override the locale per-site.
justinmayer 5y ago
Thank you for effectively confirming what I long suspected. Much appreciated.
lamontcg 5y ago
And once a rationale like this has become part of company culture for >20 years, there is almost no way it is ever changing.
ehPReth 5y ago
Interesting! Thanks :) One sad thing is localization for Canada is kind of broken for a lot of platforms it seems? For a lot of people that I help having their locale has Canada seems to usually base it off of United Kingdom stuff including setting paper size as A4(!) Which… I wish we used but unfortunately we don’t - we use the US paper system. this causes problems with stricter printers and printing and also just manufacturing stuff like PDFs

itronitron 5y ago

I think they do this to force people to login to their Google account (in order to change the language setting.)

ouid 5y ago

I mean, what's actually stupid here is that there isn't any way to configure this properly. It's wild that the default behavior is the only behavior. I'm not even sure I believe it.

chucke 5y ago

Browser install wizards already configure the default chosen language to the OS language, which should already be the preferred language, so I'd be very surprised if that was the reason they never bothered to fix this behaviour. My theory is that yes, they don't lose business because of this so why fix it, but mostly because the most valuable country-markets in the world tend to be monolingual, and the US is the most profitable of them all. And everyone uses Google despite of this because well, what else?

account42 5y ago

> native speakers with misconfigured computing environments How many of those are "misconfigured" and how many are set to en-US because that's the language they want for their computer.