Google Multilingual
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Does anyone know somebody in deep
inside Google that could point me to the right people?
I want to point something out to Google.
Google has not taken into account that in this mobile age, people are
travelling the world with their laptops or other portable devices and
surfing the net. This means that people are often browsing the internet in a country where they are not a speaker of the native language. Then why does Google assume that people will want to view their website in that language?
For example, I am frequently in Germany and using Google. I am constantly faced
with this very annoying feature of Google. Google assumes, that because I am in Germany, that I therefore want Google
in German, rather than looking at my browser language preferences,
which gives a list of preferred languages. For a company that prides themselves on delivering what the user wants,
how can they possibly get this so wrong? Even if I manually change the
language setting to what it should be (English), Google still serves up the wrong
language as shown in the accompanying image.
Hey, even I can program a bit of simple code to look a browser language
preferences and choose the right language that user wants. On the following website that I built, galerie10.at, the website detects the visitor's language preference from the browser. It then compares this against a list of languages available on the website. It will cycle through the list of the visitor's preferred languages until it finds a match. If it does not, then presents the visitor with the default.
Maybe Google can do what I did, and use their own search engine and research the following term "detect browser language preference".
