
I'm Not Japanese - sgdesign
http://sachagreif.com/im-not-japanese/
======
patio11
>> Does Google assumes that we live in The Matrix, and you can learn a new
country’s language instantly as soon as you move there? >>

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.

~~~
davidw
I am logged on to Google, and they _know_ I want English results and an
English interface, because I've gone through and done all the settings. And
yet, occasionally something goes wonky and they start showing me the interface
in Italian again.

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.

~~~
cocojumbo123
Same here. I travel a lot and use VPN to access the corporate network. So if I
am in the Chinese office google goes Chinese (and it takes some random
guessing to switch the language back to English) then in the hotel (via VPN)
it promptly goes German.

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).

------
jandrewrogers
This is one of the most infuriating things about traveling internationally.
Sites that probably know more about me than I know about myself assume that I
am a native of wherever I happen to be at the moment _and make it difficult-
to-impossible to alter that site behavior_.

If I was a completely anonymous user coming in from a location it would be an
understandable. But I'm not anonymous, I am logged in to the same account I've
been using for a decade that in almost every other use case was US-ian
English. So there really isn't any excuse. Absent any active attempt to change
settings on my part, that I prefer US-ian centric settings is an easy
inference to make even when I travel.

I want to believe there is a rationale for doing things this way but I can't
think of one. All it does is make the Internet barely usable when I travel to
many countries.

~~~
rhizome
All of which is a case for delineating language content by TLD. It's easy
enough, with fewer dialect subdirs than the monolithic techniques often
employed by sites, but IME TLDs just offer a default with all the
complications you describe carried from region to region.

But hey, Google's always been this way. Before you could even log in they used
to have a "Settings" pane where you cuold set your language to be saved in a
cookie. It would get lost all the time; you'd always have to reset it.

------
rickmb
This kind of thing pisses me off regularly. Google is one of the worst
offenders, completely ignoring browser language preferences.

But American websites in general are awful at this. They completely ignore
local diversity and sensitivities and simply assume "one country, one
language", so they will for instance happily present Flemish users with French
interfaces.

It's fucking offensive. If I type google.com instead of google.nl or google.de
or google.co.jp _and_ my browser preferred language is English, I have made it
pretty damn clear what I want.

~~~
ktizo
It is slightly more offensive to assume that .com + browser settings ==
english above the country you are originating from, if you aren't speaking
english, anyway.

~~~
rickmb
Really? The country I'm visiting from says nothing definitive about my
language of choice. Absolutely nothing.

Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice. Setting
the preferred language of my browser is an even more explicit choice.

How can honoring explicit choices be more offensive than assuming the visitor
is an idiot who can't think for themselves?

~~~
ktizo
"Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice."

No it isn't, .com is the global domain, not the english one.

~~~
kristofferR
True, but even Google.us, which abolutely is an American domain extension, is
set to thai for me.

------
po
As someone who works every day at a Japanese startup that has a
Japanese/English bilingual UI, can generate documents in different languages
than the user, multi-currency, Japanese address formatting aware, etc.. I can
say that these problems are actually quite hard to get right for most use
cases. For most companies it's not worth it.

However, once the user has _logged into your site_ as is the common case with
google properties, there is no excuse for serving the page in the wrong
language. For months google calendar on my iPhone here in Tokyo would be in
Japanese. All of the other tabs on the mobile google site would be English but
just google calendar would be Japanese locale. As far as I could tell there
was no way to fix it. Then one day it was fixed. I still see this mistake all
over the place with other sites.

I actually blame the rise of geo-ip and location databases for enabling the
ability to geo-locate users. Something about giving developers the rope to
hang themselves with…

------
aristidb
Actually, this problem also exists for native speakers in their own countries.
I'm a German in Germany, yet when I'm searching for technical terms, in the
overwhelming majority I want English results because they are better. (The
German results are often just blog posts regurgitating what somebody else
wrote in English.)

It used to be that I could use www.google.de for German searches, and
www.google.com/ncr for English searches, but that does not (reliably) work
anymore. I now grudgingly type www.google.com/?hl=en in the address bar more
often than not.

~~~
printer
On Google Search: Options -> Search settings -> Languages

There you can change the language(s) of your search result. I think you can
mark up to 10 languages.

~~~
DasIch
Google provides those settings but it seems to randomly ignore them or at
least I can't discern a pattern.

~~~
przemoc
It's not randomly. In work I use Iceweasel for private gmail (and Chrome for
company gmail), where I have set Results per page to 100 and chose to Never
show Instant results long time ago. It simply does not work!

I go to google.com, start typing and Google starts showing me some instant
results and hitting Enter gives me only 10 results per page. (The same
settings are respected for non-private gmail in Chrome, though.)

------
seanmcdirmid
This is a common expat pita. So you move to a new country, the digital world
decides that you now must immerse yourself in that country. And its quite
true: the expat demographic is minuscule so why bother accommodating it? Its
only because the technical barriers for it not being that way are so low, that
we expect the digital world to be different from the physical world, but
really, each country has its own commerce laws and you have to essentially
"break the rules" to say...operate your iTunes account from a non-local
address so you can still buy things in English.

Google isn't so bad as long as you login; in fact the first hint I'm not
logged in usually comes from a bunch of Chinese search results. Really, this
isn't as big a deal as region coding, Netflix, Hulu, and VPNs that are
constantly being attacked by your host government.

------
MarkSweep
If you are traveling and Google is trying to send you to a country specific
site, you can use this address to tell Google you actually really want to go
to Google.com:

    
    
      http://www.google.com/ncr
    

I believe the NCR stands for No Country Redirect.

But as the article points out, many websites make it harder than it aught to
be use them from other countries. Some Japenese websites sometimes even
actively try to prevent foreigners from using them by require text entry in
hiragana and disabling copy-paste with javascript.

~~~
aristidb
At least for me, that does not work anymore.

However, <http://www.google.com/?hl=en> works.

------
curiouscats
I have experienced the same annoying redirects, even when I correct it - they
again redirect to a geo search site. This has been happening less for some
reason. Also I use DuckDuckGo a lot more and don't have that problem.

YouTube is even worse. It has all sorts of data on what I view and like... Yet
if I travel it acts as though my preferences have drastically changed. This
just seems extremely lame. It is the oposite of "organizing the world's
information" sensibly. The only way to see non-hyper local completely unwanted
videos is a vpn.

The biggest complaint I have is how windows 3.1 like the whole experience is.
Let me make my settings and have those stick. Don't hide preferences in some
crazy gui (windows style) and make it some hard to retain your preferences. If
they want the default behavior to be that search results have little to do
with the person and most to do with the geo location Google thinks you are at
fine. Just make it obvious what you are doing (showing me massively
manipulated results based on location - and tell me what location you think
that is). And let me have a simple way to set my preferences to search based
on USA location (or if there is some legal reason this can't be done just tell
me so I don't wonder why the results are so crazy).

------
w00kie
I have a similar compounded problem:

I live in Japan, my systems are configured in English, but when I'm at the
office my internet is routed through a proxy which is somehow localized to
India (I have no idea where is its actual location).

\- I get Google in English most of the time (though sometimes it will pop back
to Japanese)

\- Google account settings on the other hand will most of the time show in
Japanese (I'm OK though, I know the language)

\- Search results include Japanese language websites at home

\- I get Japanese ads at home and Indian ads at work, especially funny on
Youtube.

\- Google Maps is all over the place though, sometimes showing me Japan, India
but also defaulting to US of A...

 _Note:_ you rant about two settings for language, but that makes sense. I
want to see the Google interface in English because this is my preferences for
interfaces, but I want local search results including Japanese language
websites because that is what's useful to me most of the time.

~~~
sgdesign
Yes, but as far as I can tell the two settings are not for the Google UI and
the Google Search Results (which would make sense). They're for Some Google
Products (i.e. Google Plus) and Google Search (both UI and search results).

I might be mistaken on this, but I don't think there is a way to set the
search results language independently of the UI language.

~~~
w00kie
I just tried it out and found this: <http://i.imgur.com/KL0bW.png>

Interestingly, I did a search through Chrome to get to the Google search
results page, I was not logged in and everything was in English. I proceed to
login and get reverted to Japanese (not my default). As I said before, my
settings keep getting changed automagically all the time...

------
CrLf
Desktop applications on Windows are particularly prone to this kind of thing.
If you happen to have an english version of Windows, but the locale (timezone,
currency) set to another region, many applications assume you also want the
interface in that region's language.

This is extremely annoying (especially when there's no way to choose the
language manually) and moreso considering there's a way to know the language
of the system.

------
ramchip
I've also had several problems with compilers and IDE. Recent example: Visual
C++ detects that my computer has a Japanese environment and switches its
messages to Japanese. Qt Creator takes these messages and displays them in its
output box, in the process borking them completely (□□□□ etc.), even though
_its own interface is in Japanese as well_. Now I couldn't find a switch to
make the compiler output English when called on the command line, so I
eventually just used VC++ as the main IDE.

A lot of programs require command-line switches on every invocation to change
the language if it's not the same as your OS locale.

------
stefanve
I would really like if they would look at your OS languages and use that. If I
am in France (or any other non English speaking country) and I use my English
languages device please show me the English site. Also the "you are on a
mobile site therefore I show you my crappy mobile site, without the
possibility to go do the desktop site" is really annoying especially on a
tablet. While most browsers can be set on show desktop site allot of sites
just look at the OS. Only browser that works is Opera. TL;DR stop thinking you
know better than your users what languages/site format they want.

------
devmach
This drives me crazy all the time.

Even my OS and browser are in English and i made search with "English words" (
eg. "operating system" instead of "Betriebssystem" ), search results are in
German because i'm in Germany.

At some level it's acceptable but things get weird when i use my girlfriends
notebook ( english OS, chinese browser ) : Now google decides to obey "Accept-
Language" and even i sign in with my google account, google switch language to
Chinese. Since google tries and fails to being "smart" , i have to switch
constantly between English, German and Chinese.

------
Nicole060
I use Windows with an English localization and most of the software installers
irk me to no end by defaulting to French because they don't rely on the system
language but my location.

I also hate the fact that I have to do something as cumbersome as putting the
browser in private mode whenever I'm using someone else's computer to make a
search on the english side of google since, like for japan, google.com
redirects to google.fr instead of letting me use the US database so I have to
go in the preferences and do so in private mode so as to not mess with the
cookies as they wouldn't be pleased if their google permanently turned English
even on google.fr. God damn it.

Hey GOOGLE, domain names are not just for show, FFS. If I want the French
edition, I'll go to google.fr. If I want it in English, I'll go to google.com.
Don't mess with something that worked rather well since the beginning of the
Internet.

I hate programmers who try to write "smart" software. Software that makes
attempts at thinking in your stead. Fuck off ! I know what I want, you don't
need to make annoying guess works.

------
newman314
The fix:

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pws=0&safe=off&#...</a><p>You should be
able to configure your search engine pref (at least in Firefox and Chrome) to
reflect this.

------
xiaoma
I hate this trend, too. I've always felt that if I go to the .com, then it
should offer English by default. If I go to google.co.jp, then you can show me
Japanese. Living in Taiwan, I did slowly get used to the traditional Chinese
character web. But there's no way I want to or even can go through that every
time I take a week-long trip somewhere.

Respect the language settings of my browser, or even my machine as a
reasonable default and the world is a better place!

~~~
lynnae
Why should .com be an automatic english language domain? It defines no single
country.

co.uk co.us co.au

for example, I'd be surprised if they defaulted to anything other than English
for a public website. But not .com

~~~
xiaoma
While .com doesn't define a single country, there was a huge development of US
.com sites (and the internet in general) before there was much of an internet
presence outside the English speaking world at all. In fact since most
browsers (early and modern both) came out of the US, there wasn't even support
for some non-roman character sets until later. That's how history went.

Furthermore, English is the single language widely use by travelers, heard in
movies and even in local pop songs all over the world. English is the one
language in which nearly anyone on the internet can recognize the name of
their own language. Anyone in Russia could recognize that "Russian" refers to
their own language, but how many Spaniards would realize that "スペイン語" was what
they had to click on a Japanese site to find their own language?

Anything other than English would be a _terrible_ default for a .com

------
mintplant
Rdio, for one, is restricted by its licensing agreements with the record
labels.

------
zalew
and the worst part is, it can be solved with a simple tiny link/dropdown
'language' in the header or footer, it's not rocket science.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
...unless the language menu is itself localized. This happens so often its not
funny. Even finding the language menu is hard, since its title often localized
also.

~~~
smcl
This bugs the hell out of me, what is wrong with little flag + two letter code
to indicate the current language, and maybe a little arrow to indicate that it
is a menu you can select from.

~~~
DanBC
I agree a drop down list is the nice solution.

But it's not as easy as a bunch of flags and ISO 3166 codes.

What happens for countries where there is no official language and two
languages commonly spoken? (US: English and Spanish; Spain: Spanish and
Catalon etc etc.)

~~~
bolasanibk
India has 22.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_in_India#Eighth_Schedule_to_the_Constitution)

------
jayfuerstenberg
Yahoo Japan thinks I'm a woman despite my Yahoo profile saying otherwise. All
I get is ads for women's undies and makeup.

Google's search is pretty bad too, it really pushes me to the Japanese page
even though I want English since the results differ. They hide the English
page link way at the bottom in small font text and don't make clear that it's
the English version.

~~~
w00kie
A better explanation is that Yahoo! Japan believes you are a cross-dresser...

~~~
wookietrader
There definately is a correlation of "coming up with this thought" and "what
username do I pick on HN?".

------
jasonlotito
At least Google let's you keep a single account. Apple is awful in this
regard. The App Store experience is the _worst_ I've ever experienced with
regards to this problem. I despise it. I point to it a shining example of how
despite all the credit they get, they can fail hard at basic elements of
usability.

------
jswanson
Google customises its searches to such a degree that I've set up two different
quick search keywords in chrome:

ge : will search google.com with primary language = en g : will search
google.co.jp with primary language = jp

I get wildly different result sets every time. And usually, one is spot on
with what i'm looking for and the other is useless.

------
Semaphor
It gets even better. My OS is in English. My browser is set to English and
prefers English. My Android phone is in English. I have Google set to English.
At all the 3 different places I could find.

Most of Google is in English. <https://accounts.google.com/b/0/SmsAuthConfig>
is set to German with no possibility to change it (that I can see). The
Android market shows me German movies, German books and German games.

I honestly believe the only way to have a decent, single-language experience
is to live in a purely English speaking country, never move away, never use a
device that was used in a non-English-speaking-country and of course speak
English.

Seems to be really hard to save somewhere what someone wants -.-

------
alkimie
Use Google No Country Redirect.

I struggled with this at length both for my computers and those of my children
until I found the obscure google switch:

google.com/ncr

That tells google not to attempt to redirect to local language. You will have
to set this in your search preferences as the google search URL.

Hope this helps,

John

------
bane
This drives me crazy when I travel to Korea. I inevitably spend a day or two
hunting through preferences to get Google to stop serving me Korean Language
pages. Eventually it seems to "stick", but I have to set it back to English at
least two or three times.

I never thought about it in terms of personalization, I figured that being in
Korea I _should_ be getting Korean pages served to me, and I would have to
make the effort to get it back to English.

------
gbog
There is also the inverse problem on some input interfaces. I do have to write
emails, sms, weibos, HN comments in English, Chinese and French. I don't know
how ios handle this issue but on you have to open a thing, tap, close, and it
is not very convenient. I use Swype beta, which is actually good, but it is
annoying to live in a world where monolingual is the norm.

I have no figure but I'd guess multilingual is actually the norm in many
countries.

------
lttlrck
It doesn't make much sense that Google switched languages when you wife _told_
it to? You are kidding right?

And you think you are being fair!!!

------
mike_esspe
There is also a minor problem with google play - it shows local currency, and
I couldn't find how to switch it to dollars.

------
pom
And amazingly, going to Google Maps still defaults to a map of the US...
(edit: when you go to maps.google.com)

~~~
briandear
Well sure. just like ditu.google.cn defaults to a China map. maps.google.co.uk
defaults to a UK map, maps.google.fr defaults to France. Google IS an American
company, so maybe google.com ought to direct to a US map.

------
droidist2
Perhaps deep down you really want to be Japanese though. Google might know you
better than you know yourself.

------
hoi
This isn't isolated to google, bing is far worse because it's difficult to
switch languages. Then there are a gazillion company product support sites
which also default the language for you, particularly tricky when you are
looking for a specific driver update.

------
laumars
Language settings aside, this guy also completely misses the point of how CDNs
and localised data centres work, and why it's beneficial to serve localised
content rather than constantly dragging Japanese traffic through American data
centres.

------
LargeWu
Maybe it doesn't work as well as we want it to on the fringes. Maybe, just
maybe, there are bugs in their software. I know, it's hard to fathom, bugs in
software. Google is not immune to this just because they're Google. The fact
that everybody seems to think they are _entitled_ to perfectly working free
software products is an amazing testament to the quality of what they produce.

Google products are in fact written by humans, and are therefore imperfect. It
will have bugs. So let's all rein in the misplaced outrage and reflect on all
the amazing stuff Google provides to us, free of charge.

Then, please go watch this Louis CK clip, and then re-evaluate whether this is
worth a blog post.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

------
draftable
My girlfriend worked in Spain last year, so I spent about 4 months living in
Madrid. I've been back in Australia for 6 months, but the majority of my
Facebook ads still show up in Spanish.

------
propercoil
i was about to post a blog of how angry i am that i see the localized version
of google when i change to analytics or change to y adwords account it pisses
me off! just give me ENGLISH!

------
peteforde
To me, the saddest thing about this problem is that the solution is over to
just write less code. Be less smart, instigate fewer aggressive redirects to
"mobile" sites.

------
cientifico
This is common. I am spanish living in Germany. If you want to change the
language the only thing that works is:

\- Buy a machine in the contry you want and proxy through it.

------
smagch
I'm Japanese.

I'm customizing my Chrome's ominibox to use both google.com and google.co.jp.
And I'm also configuring amazon, wikipedia, googlemap and so on the same way.

------
nihonjon
Lifehacker and other multinational blogs should take note as well.

The cynic in me wants to tell you that you'll only learn Japanese better if
you immerse yourself ;)

------
SLuijk
There is a link at the bottom of the home page called "google.com". It has
magic powers!

~~~
briandear
Why should I link to google.com when that's what I typed in the first place?

------
hcarvalhoalves
The classical mistake of assuming the language should be the same as the
locale.

~~~
jrockway
A mistake in the sense that it ignores a standard that everyone else ignores,
but delivers the correct language to 99.999% of the visitors?

(Hint: most people in Japan speak Japanese. There are 126,000,000 Japanese in
Japan, compared to 1,000,000 foreigners. Most of the foreigners are Korean and
Chinese and probably understand Japanese just fine. Hell, so do most
Americans, probably. My point is: if you're in Japan, it's quite reasonable
for a website to default to Japanese.)

------
theprecisionist
I'm sorry but doesn't a VPN solve this problem?

~~~
wookietrader
It also introduces other problems, like latency.

------
pinaceae
google.com/intl/en/

there you go.

------
ktizo
_I’m not Japanese._

No shit.

 _But ever since my wife and I moved to Kyoto, the Internet sure seems to
think we are._

The internet does not think. Or if it does, it has weird proto-dreams of
kittens and porn. But it does not think of you, or your wife.

 _Google is supposedly this big, Skynet-like company that lives to collect
data on us._

Stop believing the shiny box. It lies.

 _Yet it’s not very smart about language._

Pot. Kettle.

 _As soon as we stepped foot in the land of the rising sun, it asked my wife
if she wanted to display Google in Japanese, and she clicked “yes” by
mistake._

And unfortunately, it launched the nukes.

 _Not only did Google start showing her its user interface in Japanese, but
the real problem was that all her search results were from Japanese sites,
too!_

But it didn't launch the nukes after all, but instead did exactly as
instructed.

 _And going back seemed impossible._

Here in our story, our protagonist discovers entropy.

 _Going through Google.com instead of Google.co.jp did nothing. Changing her
langage settings was just as useless._

My god. Those evil fiends. Is just like that bit in the bible where they build
a tower to heaven and stuff.

 _Turns out Google Search uses a different language preference page._

Wooo! We have finality. There are two preference panes. Which are really hard
to find if you change language to something you cant read by pressing the
wrong buttons.

And furthermore, google are just a big company and have no magic wizards that
do magic and stuff. They do not know what you are thinking unless you are
within a couple of meters at best. So do not expect things to know what you
meant to do but didn't for at least the next 2 years or so.

~~~
jtheory
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747>

~~~
ktizo
I was being very snarky, admittedly. The article just really irritated me and
I was extremely drunk on rum.

