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by CodesInChaos 1748 days ago
> A device’s location/IP address isn’t indicative of the language preference of the person using it

I really don't understand why this is so popular (google being a major offender). The browser already sends the preferred language(s) as a http header.
2 comments
arp242 1748 days ago
It's a major PITA as I live in a country where I don't speak the language well. It's even worse when there's no obvious way to just get it in English. It's triple worse if they decide to "localize" content for you based on your location even if you have everything set to a different country anyway.

Google really sucks at this; I can set it to English or Dutch all I want, but I still get suggestions and results in Indonesian. Funny enough, the date format is always in the confusingly reverse "month/day/year" in spite of their ham-fisted forcing of everything else.

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lucb1e 1747 days ago
Seconded. I'd really love to finally hear from the person at Google that made this decision. There has to be some reason, of all companies I'd trust Google to be both big enough to have a good overview of what it should be (based on complaints, user research, the impact they know this decision has) and engagement testing (since they do a lot of things based on data).

Not that I'd know where to complain to, but Google employees have friends so it would reach them in some modicum anyhow if others experience this problem as well. And everyone who ever went to a country whose language they're not very comfortable in will be having this problem.

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zapzupnz 1747 days ago
I must say, I don’t encounter this issue. I live in New Zealand, you would expect English to default to English. Instead, because I use my computers in French, it defaults to French — even when I log in and tell it (repeatedly) to favour English results.

(Don’t ask why I use my OS in French but want English results; it’s not that interesting) :-)

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