[Udo]

Pretty much every major site will completely ignore not only your browser's language settings but also onsite user account settings and other desperate attempts at selecting the language. The only thing that matters is your IP address.

For example, accessing Google: my browser is set to accept English only. I'm entering the English URL. In my account settings I periodically reset everything I can find to English (settings apparently decay, too). Google knows I want the English version. Yet, they still give me the interface in whatever language my IP address comes from. And not only the UI, search results as well.

Recently it's gotten even worse than that: Google figured out I'm actually German, so they start defaulting to German more often now - ignoring everything else. At least with the IP address-based routing it was impersonal.

I happened to be in Sweden when I linked my Facebook calendar to my Google calendar. Ever since that day, my friends' birthdays are given to me in Swedish. Facebook knows I want English, yet for some reason this is how it's got to be.

The same abuse is apparently considered best practice at new startups as well: recently I was testing a browser game for an acquaintance who's on their development team. Because I was in Portugal at the time, I of course got the site in Portuguese. Manually switching that to English, the game still started up in Portuguese. It's been doing that ever since. Every email I get from that company is in Portuguese, too, even though I tried everything I could to set my language to English.

It's a source of endless frustration, maybe even a hostile act. They're effectively saying "Your choices don't matter, we know what's best for you. You're from country X, so you _must_ speak Xish. People are on the internet to enjoy regional separation. Really, it's best."

[morsch]

Go to http://www.google.com/ncr (once, it sets a cookie) to fix this at least for the search results.

[nrser]

can anyone provide insight into the business reasoning behind this? i really can't conceive of why you would want to supersede a user's exact, known language with a guess. sites are pretty difficult to use when you can't read anything. maybe there are technical issues for some sites, but Google search is the worse i've ever dealt with, and they def have some resources behind that.

[preinheimer]

Mostly it's because people don't know how to change that setting. Imagine walking up to a computer in a shared space (hotel lobby, library, etc.) and it's been configured to send out accept-language: <something you don't understand>.

Many of the people reading Hacker News will be able to find and change that setting. My mom never will. She'll just know she went to google.com, and saw Chinese.

If you're using a computer in a country, and websites seem to be showing you things in the language of that country, that's something you can probably understand. If you're using a computer and some websites insist on showing you some other language, you'll be confused.

[ds9]

It's true that most people leave the defaults. However, there may an easy solution for a subset of cases.

Do the browser defaults in any country include multiple language settings? It seems likely that in most countries, the default would be only one language. And if this is the case, then if multiple alternatives are present in the request headers, it's very likely the user or computer admin has deliberately changed it, and that in turn would mean that sites should respect the choices.

This might still be wrong in when the settings were made by someone other than the current user, or there are multiple languages default-configured, but it might be a step in the right direction.

[derefr]

> Imagine walking up to a computer in a shared space (hotel lobby, library, etc.) and it's been configured to send out accept-language: <something you don't understand>.

If web browsers could somehow figure out they were running either under a guest/public-use account, or in a kiosk mode, they could avoid sending an Accept-Language header at all. Then,

1. in cases where the header is sent, it would mean a lot more (and hopefully override both online-profile-stored and IP-detection-based answers);

and 2. in cases where the header isn't sent, using an answer from an online profile setting or IP-detection would no longer be against-standard.

[mook]

While that excuses ignoring the Accept-Language header, it doesn't make sense for overriding the user's explicit configuration in their profile; you wouldn't expect that to be shared.

That, and I'd expect public computers to disallow that sort of configuration anyway, so it would be stuck at the default value, which should be sensible for the location it's set up in; it's not like it would move around...

[thefreeman]

It sounds like it could be legal? I know different countries have different agreements / restrictions with google about search results.

[nocoment]

Well, the Adword value of your visit is considerably higher in the primary language of your location.

[kalleboo]

And don't forget that no matter what your IP, no matter what your language setting, no matter what country you have set, Google Maps will still default you to showing a view of the continental United States. You're in Tokyo, searching for Yokohama? Here's Yokohama Sushi in downtown Los Angeles. For a while, the new web Google Maps redesign even removed the HTML5 Location API "my position" button. It's back now, but it should be defaulting to showing your location, like the mobile apps do.

[derefr]

The web version is actually localized by domain.

http://maps.google.com is the US-local Google Maps; http://maps.google.ca defaults to Canada; http://maps.google.co.jp sends you to Japan; etc.

[_delirium]

Huh, I didn't know that. But why geoIP-based redirects on some sites and not others? google.com redirects me to google.dk, and even blogspot.com redirects me to blogspot.dk, but maps.google.com doesn't take me to maps.google.dk.

[derefr]

I believe the logic was that "google.com" always does the redirect, because people tend to type google.com manually into their address bar a lot. Google has never bothered to set up any other redirects itself.

Other services that Google has acquired, though (e.g. Blogger, Youtube, etc.) may have come pre-set-up with redirection logic, and Google has mostly left that untouched.

[kalleboo]

Blogspot changed their behavior long after Google bought them.