Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

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"it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane."

Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious. In Japan, the romaji/english and the native map indexes seem to be entirely disjoint (and partially incomplete) sets of data. If your language is english you can search for things by name in romaji and find them, but not find them when searching in hiragana or kanji! The opposite also occurs (searching for things that have english names is frequently problematic).

They also do terrifically irritating things like rendering map kanji at microscopic sizes, then re-rendering them smaller when you (silly user!) have zoomed the map to make them big enough to read. And the design of the trip-planner interface is so confusing as to be borderline unusable.

> Google maps' treatment of languages is also atrocious.

Google's handling of the language issue in general is pretty atrocious. On my iPhone which is too old for any plugins and such on Mobile Safari, I can't do an image search quickly without a modal popping up and asking if I want to switch to English or stay in Russian. (US Expat in Russia, phone is all in english) On my laptop, it doesn't even give me the option to change the language if I'm not logged into Google at the time, even though my laptop is in English as well. It's been a major point of annoyance to not have the ability to really control what languages are served to you when it seems to me that it would be a pretty conscious decision to have your computer in X language when your IP is from a country where X isn't the primary language. The reasons I've heard for using IP instead of Accept-Language just seem like exceptions to the rule rather than the more common rule, but of course I'm just an outsider looking in on this one and don't have any data to really back that.

And to have it absolutely every time on my phone (no cache clearing) is also frustrating, regardless of whether I log in or not. It's not even so much about the different expected language; I understand Russian well enough to use the site and different functions. It's getting a nag every single time I want to do a quick search for something that is frustrating and that for everything else that gets stored about my browsing habits that they can't seem to remember that the last 30 times they asked me, I switched to English because I wanted results in English.

Why a simple toggle like DuckDuckGo has isn't used is beyond me as well. The site language is english, if I want russian local results, I just toggle the region switch for Russia at the top. Or I can isolate where I want my targeted results from. It just seems like a huge oversight from Google on this one that should absolutely be something they don't falter on.

I share your frustrations. I'm a British expat living in Berlin, and before that in Bogotá, Colombia. I originally set up my Google account in the UK and used it for years in the UK.

Whilst living in Bogotá I had set all the relevant options to have all my search results etc in English. When I moved to Berlin, I was slightly disappointed that all my results came up in German by default and I again had to manually force everything to English, but I could sort-of forgive this being as I was physically in Germany, and perhaps local language is a sensible default for relevant local results etc, etc.

Then last week, I was in the US and my search results started defaulting to German! Logged in on the same google account, on the same phone. I find it frankly unbelievable that Google could infer that this would be my preference, given the history on my account.

That's interesting, because Google search is actually pretty good at the Japanese script thing.

So they have the technology to do cross-script indexing in Japanese for maps, they just don't use it?

Take a trip to Korea, after you come back hotel prices stay in Korean won on Google Maps, until you reinstall the app, pathetic...

This happened to me after a stopover in Dubai; for months all my prices were in UAE Dirhams, and only reinstalling the app fixed it. It's been this way for quite a long time as far as I can tell; I guess having a monopoly on a good map with good local business info leads to this kind of apathy.

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