It’s really annoying. I’m in Japan but if I type in English it wants to give me Japanese results. So pointless. I know how to fix the problem in their browser search pages so don’t bother telling me that it can be fixed, because there are several Google apps for android devices that have no apparent fixes. So I just delete them and use different search engines.
My question is merely what do they hope to gain from ignoring input text and focusing instead on location? Why would they do that?
Because most users want results related to their own language and location. For every person like you who’s an English speaker in Japan, there are thousand of Japanese speakers in Japan who appreciate the setup.
I would be really pissed at Google if I searched for some French phrase, hoping to find out what it means, and they arrogantly assumed I wanted to load French Google written entirely in French even though I was clearly searching from America and hadn’t chosen to use the very easy to find option of changing my language.
What would they hope to gain by doing it your way, except mollifying the 1 in 1,000,000 user who is both 1) in a county that speaks a different language than he wants to search in and 2) too lazy to set the search preference manually?
Because they’re bastards.
Outside the USA one has to go through hoops to actually get google.com and not whatever sad parochial local version one is nearer to, such as google.co.uk. And they still slip local results into google.com. By personalizing results they ensure everyone’s internet is unique to that person, fragmenting the web.
Google’s own blogging service Blogger has for some years shown local suffixes, country TLDs, in the URL — such as kitten-pleasure.com being shown as kitten-pleasure.fr in France and kitten-pleasure.cn in China — in order to censor by country.
And you wouldn’t be pissed if you searched on Google.com in English for “apples” and got nothing but page after page of バラ科リンゴ属の落葉高木樹。またはその果実のこと。植物学上はセイヨウリンゴと呼ぶ。 目次. [非表示]. 1 植物学上の特徴; 2 栽培法と品種. 2.1 栽培法; 2.2 樹形と台木; 2.3 品種. 2.3.1 世界一生産量の多いリンゴ「ふじ」 …
ふじ - リンゴジュース - リンゴ属 - 奇跡のリンゴ…?
If Japanese people want to find out what “apple” means there’s no shortage of dictionaries around.
I wonder if all Dopers are aware of how difficult it is to configure Google to a non-local language. And different Google facilities make their decisions differently. In addition to the most obvious places to change setting, you have to remember to change the language at Search Settings – I don’t even know how to get to that page via obvious menu options. And heaven help you if you ever dare to reset Google’s cookies. Despite my efforts, Google still presents me with Thai language sometimes. Also annoying are U.S. websites that insist on telling me prices in Thai baht.
I like Wikipedia: prefix “en.” to a URL for the English version. Should Google negotiate with Wikipedia for the rights to that patent?
When I was in Puerto Rico, I found Google’s redirection to their Spanish-language .pr site mildly annoying but tolerable. I can read Spanish well enough to handle a basic UI, but still, I would rather have used regular google.com.
It’s very annoying for people that travel, specially if you travel in places that use a different alphabet and it becomes a guessing game to find were to change the language.
The sensible thing to do would be to use the OS or browser language settings to decide what language to be served.
That is the answer right there. Find a search engine that is more suited to your style or invent one if you don’t like it. Google is a (very useful) business and not a public service or a charity. You can also write to Google and tell them what language preferences options you would like them to include. They may be willing to invest the money in investing in better user-specific preferences if enough people have the same complaint.
The simple reason that software doesn’t meet every user specific need is just because of money and complexity on a level that might interfere with other users needs. The ability to both predict and automatically adjust to location is a huge benefit to 99%+ of people. You happen to be in the 1% and they haven’t had enough demand to develop custom solutions that meet your exact needs. For all we know, there are more travelling business people that also demand that their searches get instantly converted into the local language upon landing without a lot of fiddling around because they speak 8 languages fluently.
In short, you may have a legitimate complaint but it would be classified as ‘low importance’, ‘low priority’ on any software project plan.
It seems that most people do not understand that doing as you suggest either DOES NOT WORK AT ALL or IS NOT POSSIBLE on certain apps and devices.
My android device has its language set to English, has a Google browser app that is in English. When I search in English with it I get only Japanese results, which I can read, but which I do not want becuase they are shitty and inferior. There is no way to chage the results.
How does Google handle language in heavily multilingual areas?
E.g. if you are in Switzerland, does it try to detect what canton you are in and assign you whichever of the four official languages is most common there, or does it ask? If you live in a primarily German-speaking area but you want your results in French, is it easy to get it?
How about other countries? Does Google try to predict (“guess”) whether users in Finland are Finnish or Swedish speakers based on some algorithm?
It’s a two-way street: if, as here, they offer a deliberately degraded experience — and channel the big boys of software by insisting, ‘Fuck you, you will do things our way and be unable to choose your own options because we know best what you should have.’ — then the consumer will slowly use less and less of their products.
Their tragedy is that they will never know which of their stupid decisions actually turned people away.
Starts up in the majority language, with links under the box for other languages. For example, google.es opens up in Spanish but offers català, galego and euskera (Catalan, Galician and Basque) just under the box. When I get a redirect from google.com, sometimes it starts in English but offers the local language as an option, sometimes it opens up directly in the local language.
Google wants you to set up a Google account, the better to track your habits. But the account will also let you set your preferences, including language settings, across multiple apps and multiple devices. Of course, you still have to log in to your Google account, but hopefully you’ll only need to do this once per device.
I think Ale was suggesting that Google should read device language settings, not that users should. Given that all kinds of installations programs are perfectly capable of doing that in all kinds of computing environments, I don’t see how it would be impossible for Google.
