Wise Up Google

Because I travel quite a bit I always run into an issue where Google or some other website decides to be really smart and change the language of their website to the language of the locale from which I’m accessing the internet from. MySpace is/was the worst because no matter how many times you tell it to remember who you are it forgets every time you close the browser so the next time you go back it treats you like a first time visitor. When I was living in Gibraltar – where the official language is English – it used to get confused by my proximity to Spain and throw up the MySpace homepage in Spanish.

As much as it pissed me off, at least I kinda-sorta know enough Spanish to be able to find the language preferences and change them. Other languages aren’t so easy. When I arrived in Thailand everything Google was in Thai. Unless you can read Thai script (so far I know 3 consonants and 1 vowel out of 44 consonants and 15 vowels – Man would I be screwed on Thai Wheel of Fortune) your only way of changing your settings is to click on stuff until you see a page that resembles the preferences page you might remember setting up in English at some point in the past and then changing the language to something random. If you’re lucky the random language you selected wasn’t Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese or some other language that doesn’t use Roman characters and you can make a rough guess at which one says “English.”

Here’s a clue Google . . . quit geotargeting my IP address and look at the damn browser settings. Last time I checked my log files the browser sent over its version which includes the language the browser is in. In this case en-US for US English. Which seems to be a better indicator in terms of what language I would prefer to view your website in; what part of the world someone logs in from or the language settings in their browser? Not everybody who access the internet from Thailand can read and write Thai but I’m willing to bet 99.9999% of the people with their browser language options set to Thai can read and write Thai.

Yesterday I arrived in Sweden and this is what Google changed my homepage to:

Notice that even in the URL it says that this is the en-US version yet Google decided it knows what languages I speak better than I do and decided to serve me up the Swedish version of their homepage.

STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!