On Friday 7. January 2005. 07:35, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
What google does is actually even more annoying than
this. When I
travel in Europe, Google redirects me to the site they think I want
based on my *geographical location*. So when I'm in Germany, they
assume I speak German, when I'm in Italy, they assume I speak Italian,
etc.
This is disconcerting and unpleasant for me.
Better by far would be for them to combine information from my default
browser language and my location to offer me options that are likely
to make the most sense.
If I'm in Germany, but with English as my default language, why not
offer me a German/English hybrid page?
I worked on this, and can tell that the problem lies in the fact that most
people don't have default language set (even though they prefer it or even if
it is the only language they know). So, if a user has default language other
than English, it could be assumed that the user really wants content in that
language; but if default language is English, it doesn't tell much.
I agree however that selecting the language by geographic location is not very
good idea. It may help some people, probably even most people, but it will
hinder other. In addition to your problem, it does not always give correct
results - for example my provider was connected to the Internet via a
provider in The Netherlands, and sure enough, Google was giving me its front
page in Dutch. And it is much better to get a page in a known foreign
language than in an unknown foreign language.
And if you think that you have some problems with Google, try visiting
http://www.google.com/intl/sr/ from Lynx and you will see :((
Google
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Instead of a link to *either* 'Images' *or*
'Bilder' they could say:
"Hmm, his browser wants English, but he's in Germany, so let's give
him: 'Images (Bilder)'.
That's probably the best solution, but could be somewhat complicated to
make...
In our case, we don't have (to my knowledge) the
technical ability to
make a good guess of where people are in a timely fashion. So we can
An excellent tool that I know of is
http://www.geobytes.com/iplocator.htm but
it would cost quite some money for a site of Wikipedia's size
(
https://secure.geobytes.com/buy.htm#MapBytes).