I have no problems if their default is the local language - that's pretty much a no-brainer - but when I've told them in no uncertain terms what my own preferences are, they ought to respect that.
One small improvement would be to write the name of the language in the original and not in whatever country's version. (e.g. English instead of Angol, etc).
Fun!
Google is making the (completely wrong) assumption that those people cannot type google.co.jp instead of google.com and make their own choices.
But at least in Japan they're probably right about the language. Google pulls the same crap in multilingual countries, and gets it wrong a lot of the time. This isn't Google being smart, this is Google being lazy and insensitive.
You're making the completely unsupported assumption that the average internet user understands domain names. Like patio11 suggested, if a user from a Japanese IP is accessing google.com, it's likely that this address was pre-configured in some way: the search bar was set up like that, or the company sysadmin set up the home page like that. But even if the user manually typed "google.com", if they're in Japan it's still (way) more likely that they wanted a Japanese version rather than the English one.
Also, they either use the English version of the OS and browser, or the one in their language, and both come with the default correct preferred language settings.
The same goes for company systems. You don't give someone who can't handle English an English language system, and the idea of setting up a system in language X but pre-configuring that in some what that English becomes the preferred browser language is a really odd edge case.
Even if such scenarios are more common, it still doesn't excuse telling people that make explicit choices to go fuck themselves, especially in multi-lingual countries where such explicit choices are common.
Japan may be relatively homogenous, but most countries in Europe are either formally multilingual or have large immigrant populations. Many thousands of people are regularly being confronted with misplaced assumptions about their preferred language.
You can't assume language from geo-IP databases, it is the most unreliable and inappropriate method imaginable, and you are 100% sure to regularly piss people off.
People don't know the difference between the google search bar and the address bar.
Understatement.
Also, if in Japan, I would be surprised to find google.com not to be in Japanese, and I would expect to have to perhaps make some kind of preparations for the fact that the majority of the world does not speak my language and that my electronic devices and services are not universal metatrons run by omnipresent deitys either.
If you are a local you are probably very used to your country domain, it is probably on par with .com.
Now the Accept-Language is quite subtle and guess how that is set up in an internet café? Can you even change it? Will the next customer be happy about that? I'd be mighty impressed if more than 1% of the people that surfs the web has a clue about Accept-Language.
Also, if one asks for a local country domain that really should be the localized version, sometimes I actually want to use google for a language different other than my own.
If I for instance wanted to search in English on something that has a similar wording as Swedish I'd like to go to google.com in order to quickly get rid of the Swedish-bias (since that doesn't work I sometimes use google.co.uk instead).
Many people are however, and mass media, which includes Google, however they may try to deny it, lives by the numbers, which means adapting to the lowest common denominator. Just think, as the Internet spreads, Google will evolve (devolve) closer and closer to broadcast TV!
From the article:
>The problem is compounded by the fact that most of the time, you have no way of doing anything about it. And when you can do something, it’s often buried in layers of menus, which –don’t forget– are all in Japanese, Bhutanese, or Martian…
I think you're missing a key point in the article.
1. Are in the tiny minority of people in Japan who don't speak Japanese
AND
2. Chose to switch to Japanese when Google asked them if they'd prefer Google in Japanese or English
Google guessing that she might have been Japanese was not the major problem here. The ultimate problem was her incorrectly stating her language preference. It's hard to see what reasonable measures Google could have taken to inconvenience fewer people here.
In all my travels I had to deal with language issues from Google. But it goes beyond that, as the vast majority of i18n'ed sites favor IP location over Accept-Language. I find this trend saddening.
what event/law are you referring to? why blogspot should be censored in germany?
It only displays the same content if that content is compliant for the local region.
Thus, in the Nazi example, all off blogspot get the posts except blogspot.de, who filter it out somehow.
That's something that Youtube doesn't do with adverts very well - I'm in the UK, I've not left the UK, my IP geolocates to the UK, but I often get US ads in Youtube. Advertising law is different and often the ads are not compliant for the UK.
That to me seems wrong. No one learns a language in 7 hours.
Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are actually Japanese speakers of Japanese (true preference: "Accept-Language: ja-jp;q=1.0; en;q=0.000001") whose configurations have been borked at the manufacturer or the IT department level, and who will be terribly served by content written in English. It's an act of charity that they even ask about English prior to defaulting you into Japanese. (They haven't always done that -- every year or two it seems to switch for me.)
This is a particularly acute issue since most users of Google don't actually have accounts on it, their best attempts to fix that to the contrary. As a result, in key ways such as language, the service needs to "just work" for the majority of their users. Also, if I was to have a totally clinical view of the situation, the expected value of 1 English speaker in terms of ad clicks is ridiculously below the expected value of 1 Japanese speaker in terms of ad clicks, given that both are in Japan (+), and you're asking to sacrifice 99 Japanese speakers to save the 1 English speaker. Once you accept that there will be a loser in this decision either way, figuring out who the loser should be is not that hard. Sorry: I'd prefer English, too.
>> And by the way, want to check out a post on Blogspot? Off to blogspot.jp you go. This doesn’t change the page itself, only the URL. So what does redirecting me accomplish, except make me feel that I’m not in control of what sites I can access? >>
This is a hack around censorship laws in a few places (most relevantly to the instant case, Germany, I believe). Google has a blogspot.jp which is a copy of .com which is a copy of .de which is a copy of... except that they enforce country-specific censorship laws. This was deemed an acceptable tradeoff versus getting all of blogspot blacklisted in e.g. Germany.
n.b. No special inside knowledge here.
(+) If this is not intuitively obvious to you talk to me about AdWords geotargetting and default settings sometime.