Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?

Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by LamboJ on Friday March 11, 2022 @08:02AM (#30639283)

I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by Symbiote on Friday March 11, 2022 @10:30AM (#30641064)

I added Accept-Language to our web logs for a month before we added our first site translation.

That showed us that the majority of people had a language matching the expectation we would have from an IP geolocation, so we use Accept-Language alone.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by nicolas_t on Friday March 11, 2022 @08:41AM (#30639735)

That hasn't been my experience both from running a site in Europe using the accept language header as default and from my anecdotal experience with friends in Asia and Europe.

In general, I think using geoip is much more likely to get things wrong than using the accept language.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by netsharc on Friday March 11, 2022 @12:22PM (#30642885)

I wonder if they could just change the browser to hint about "Do you want content in your local language?". I wonder if the dominant browser vendor on the web would be willing to accommodate Google...

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by account42 on Monday March 14, 2022 @07:03AM (#30670880)

The could even work together with the dominant smartphone OS maker to solve it there as well.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by ivan_ah on Friday March 11, 2022 @08:12AM (#30639381)

Yes, that's exactly my experience.

Most people who install windows don't bother to set the locale correctly, so everyone ends up en-US.

So if you trust the Accept Language header, you'll get it wrong.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by nicolas_t on Friday March 11, 2022 @08:42AM (#30639745)

In which country did you see that? I'm curious because that contradicts my experience.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by ivan_ah on Friday March 11, 2022 @09:32AM (#30640366)

My anecdotes are from two countries:

1. In Quebec, Canada where French speakers keep the default en-US, even thought most of their work and communications will be in fr-CA.

2. In Bulgaria, because most people learned computer concepts in English so seeing OS and Browser menus in Bulgarian would be confusing to them.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by nicolas_t on Friday March 11, 2022 @11:30AM (#30641967)

Thanks, I guess both cases make sense and in that case geolocation probably works better.

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Re:Why does Google use location for language rather than bro... by Nextgrid on Friday March 11, 2022 @08:42AM (#30639748)

So if that's the case then give them the en-US version? They'll either accept it because that's what they've explicitly requested, or change their system settings to match what they actually want.

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