[Symbiote]

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium?

> Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks

The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-endian dates annoy me.

[scrollaway]

Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city / area. I speak French. And I don’t want results in French, I want results in English.

Google thinks they known better - they do not.

[laurent92]

The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality, tech articles are dumbed down, tutorials in French lose nuance, and, well, good luck finding Hacker News in French. It was a revolution for me when I gained access to the English web, it’s the origin of the documents! I want results in English because the quality is higher in English!

[yodsanklai]

>The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality

It depends. It is definitely the case for tech but not for everything. For philosophy, science, movie reviews, cooking, and of course anything related to French culture, there's a lot of high quality content.

[tharkun__]

Disclaimer: Choosing to reply here for "reasons" but there's lots of siblings I could've chosen.

Reading comments so far and the article I think we're mixing up many different use cases and choices.

If I set my browser to English, that means I want the interface language to definitely be English. Do no serve me the interface in Japanese just because I'm in Japan. I won't even be able to find the "Change language here" dropdown ...

Now search results are a different thing. If I type something into www.google.com while being on US soil with en-us as my language setting that is in French, isn't it obvious that I might primarily be served French language content and that is what I want too? While the interface of Google is still in English? Or vice versa? If I type an English language query into www.google.fr while fr-fr is my language setting, I expect worldwide results in English, while my interface is still in French. Sure, restaurant name search results I might want sorted differently based on location and that's a good thing overall, but leave my interface language alone!

[porknubbins]

This was one disillusionment of finally becoming fluent in a foreign language. I had kind of assumed all major languages would have similarly sized, disjoint bodies of content worth reading but English dominates everything, especially if the info is of any practical use, and only for particular cultural issues do we need to read in another language.

[amaccuish]

I think I was pretty lucky with the languages I chose. Whilst I find little good French content, the German and Russian webs are pretty well stocked.

[Foobar8568]

It's not just Google, all of them, Switzerland /German by default including the information to switch language every where

[kolinko]

If you're logged into a Google account, you can change the language in settings. (I'm in Poland, and I force Google to be in english this way)

[thih9]

The original article mentions that, as well as some shortcomings of this method.

[pbhjpbhj]

Aw man, Google UK's search "tools" feature doesn't understand UK nor ISO date formats. Such a strange choice to make.

[Blahah]

Works fine with the `before:` and `after:` filters for me

[piyh]

2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.

[FabHK]

2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

[tharkun__]

I totally prefer this date format too when I need to be clear and communicate internationally (which is most of the time).

Consider this though: It's not an inherently unambiguous and language agnostic format. It just so happens that there is no country that would write the above date as 2022-11-03. If there was, we'd have the same issue again.

[FabHK]

Apparently there are... shudder.

> Gregorian, year–day–month (YDM) This date format is used in Kazakhstan, Latvia, Nepal, and Turkmenistan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Gregorian,_year–...

[tharkun__]

Lol there goes that dream. No date format left for us.

[fsckboy]

i use 2022-03mar-11 or 202203mar11

it most importantly sorts properly when used at the front of a filename, and it's surprisingly easy to read; and in context I'm mostly looking at the month-date which can be picked off the end, "march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway

time of day can be appended without messing with the collation (usually i put a space)

[onpensionsterm]

>"march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway

I think every time this topic comes up I come across someone with this misconception - usually from a country that celebrates the 4th of July.

[Dylan16807]

So I agree with your point that the way dates are said varies. But your example isn't very good. That's just the name of the holiday, and should not be used to infer anything else.

[NovemberWhiskey]

I think you're missing the point. In the UK, for example, 2/2 is "the second of February", not "February second".

[davidgay]

Nth of month (with month sometimes elided) is most definitely standard English.

[FabHK]

It was a facetious way to refer to the USA, I believe. No other country, AFAIK, uses MM-DD-YYYY (except (former) US possessions).

[drusepth]

"The 4th of July" is the name of a holiday that happens on July 4th, a day after July 3rd and a day before July 5th.

[onpensionsterm]

Or on the 4th of July, to me.

[fsckboy]

i just looked up, the "American" confusion: we got our date order from the English long ago. Then the English changed their date order. That must have been most confusing

And month/day is not as confusing as day/month (widely used in Europe) since it doesn't correspond to how we say dates.

moving the year first then using the American MM/DD is the least confusing way to do it

[dr4g0n]

It doesn't correspond to how _you_ say dates; I would write 11/03 for the date, and say "the eleventh of March", so it's internally consistent.

Not trying to argue one way or the other, just adding some extra context.

[kichimi]

July 2nd

July 3rd

4th of July

July 5th ...

Also my experience is that only Americans say the month first. Today is the 11th of March.

[quantum_magpie]

Definitely not. Tons of non-english languages say month first.

[kichimi]

We're talking about English