Hacker News Reader

Comment by silvestrov | Hacker News Reader

Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration".

In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translations are).

These users will still want Google to return results in their native language.

There is a much much larger number of users like this than travellers from USA.

One thing that bothers me a lot with US websites is that they always assume English language means 12-hour clock.

Apple has learned the above over time: it is much easier today to get a Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks.

View on HN

"The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages! What does Google's homepage look like in Belgium?

> Mac running with English and 24-hour clocks

The UK locale (probably Ireland too) has provided a 24 hour clock in Windows for decades. Although thinking about it, little-endian dates (11 March, 11/03/2022) would probably annoy Americans as much as mixed-endian dates annoy me.

Am in Belgium. Google keeps serving me pages in Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch nor do the majority of people in my city / area. I speak French. And I don’t want results in French, I want results in English.

Google thinks they known better - they do not.

It's not just Google, all of them, Switzerland /German by default including the information to switch language every where

If you're logged into a Google account, you can change the language in settings. (I'm in Poland, and I force Google to be in english this way)

The original article mentions that, as well as some shortcomings of this method.

The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality, tech articles are dumbed down, tutorials in French lose nuance, and, well, good luck finding Hacker News in French. It was a revolution for me when I gained access to the English web, it’s the origin of the documents! I want results in English because the quality is higher in English!

>The trick is results in French are extremely bad quality

It depends. It is definitely the case for tech but not for everything. For philosophy, science, movie reviews, cooking, and of course anything related to French culture, there's a lot of high quality content.

Disclaimer: Choosing to reply here for "reasons" but there's lots of siblings I could've chosen.

Reading comments so far and the article I think we're mixing up many different use cases and choices.

If I set my browser to English, that means I want the interface language to definitely be English. Do no serve me the interface in Japanese just because I'm in Japan. I won't even be able to find the "Change language here" dropdown ...

Now search results are a different thing. If I type something into www.google.com while being on US soil with en-us as my language setting that is in French, isn't it obvious that I might primarily be served French language content and that is what I want too? While the interface of Google is still in English? Or vice versa? If I type an English language query into www.google.fr while fr-fr is my language setting, I expect worldwide results in English, while my interface is still in French. Sure, restaurant name search results I might want sorted differently based on location and that's a good thing overall, but leave my interface language alone!

This was one disillusionment of finally becoming fluent in a foreign language. I had kind of assumed all major languages would have similarly sized, disjoint bodies of content worth reading but English dominates everything, especially if the info is of any practical use, and only for particular cultural issues do we need to read in another language.

I think I was pretty lucky with the languages I chose. Whilst I find little good French content, the German and Russian webs are pretty well stocked.

2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.

2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

i use 2022-03mar-11 or 202203mar11

it most importantly sorts properly when used at the front of a filename, and it's surprisingly easy to read; and in context I'm mostly looking at the month-date which can be picked off the end, "march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway

time of day can be appended without messing with the collation (usually i put a space)

>"march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway

I think every time this topic comes up I come across someone with this misconception - usually from a country that celebrates the 4th of July.

So I agree with your point that the way dates are said varies. But your example isn't very good. That's just the name of the holiday, and should not be used to infer anything else.

I think you're missing the point. In the UK, for example, 2/2 is "the second of February", not "February second".

I understand the point entirely. I said I agree with it.

But at the same time, "Fourth of July" should not be used to infer anything about how Americans say dates. It doesn't help prove that both orders are used for dates.

In the real world, some people say day-month and some say month-day, and the holiday is called "Fourth of July". In a counterfactual world where everyone switched to month-day, the holiday would still be called "Fourth of July". So you can't use "Fourth of July" to demonstrate what people actually use for dates.

I'm not saying Americans say dates like that, I'm saying it's a reason they might consider that other people, or Americans once-upon-a-time, say dates like that.

> I'm saying it's a reason they might consider that other people, or Americans once-upon-a-time, say dates like that.

Once upon a time yes.

So that makes it sort of a reason to think those are still possible, but equally validly it acts as a reason to say nobody does that anymore.

So overall it's entirely reasonable to ignore such ambivalent evidence/"evidence".

Nth of month (with month sometimes elided) is most definitely standard English.

It was a facetious way to refer to the USA, I believe. No other country, AFAIK, uses MM-DD-YYYY (except (former) US possessions).

"The 4th of July" is the name of a holiday that happens on July 4th, a day after July 3rd and a day before July 5th.

Or on the 4th of July, to me.

I totally prefer this date format too when I need to be clear and communicate internationally (which is most of the time).

Consider this though: It's not an inherently unambiguous and language agnostic format. It just so happens that there is no country that would write the above date as 2022-11-03. If there was, we'd have the same issue again.

Apparently there are... shudder.

> Gregorian, year–day–month (YDM) This date format is used in Kazakhstan, Latvia, Nepal, and Turkmenistan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Gregorian,_year–...

Lol there goes that dream. No date format left for us.

i just looked up, the "American" confusion: we got our date order from the English long ago. Then the English changed their date order. That must have been most confusing

And month/day is not as confusing as day/month (widely used in Europe) since it doesn't correspond to how we say dates.

moving the year first then using the American MM/DD is the least confusing way to do it

It doesn't correspond to how _you_ say dates; I would write 11/03 for the date, and say "the eleventh of March", so it's internally consistent.

Not trying to argue one way or the other, just adding some extra context.

July 2nd

July 3rd

4th of July

July 5th ...

Also my experience is that only Americans say the month first. Today is the 11th of March.

Definitely not. Tons of non-english languages say month first.

We're talking about English

Aw man, Google UK's search "tools" feature doesn't understand UK nor ISO date formats. Such a strange choice to make.

Works fine with the `before:` and `after:` filters for me

Unfortunately the problem exists in both directions. I run my setup entirely in English and Google will still try to squeeze in the local non-english language.

Confusingly Google will also write some sentences half in english and half in the local language. E.g. "Google is also available in: <insert foreign language here>" (rather than the full sentence being in the foreign language.

It's the kind of attention to detail that I've become accustomed to from them

> E.g. "Google is also available in: <insert foreign language here>"

This specific one might be on purpose to avoid translating language names. If you land in page entirely in Chinese but you see the word "English" in Latin characters under a link, you can click it to escape. But if it's itself in Chinese you'll never find it. I do the same in applications, have a menu for languages but don't translate language names, if you change language by mistake you can always find your way back.

The whole sentence "This page in English" or "This page in Mandarin" should be in English or Mandrin respectively.

Compare "Rirgwyd rkrgru dlwhgi ro English" to "This page in English". Which is better for people that only read English?

They're pretty close.

And when a page is in the correct language, I would prefer not to have entire sentences in a different language.

If needs be put a "Language Settings" header above it or something, but if you can read the rest of the page then those sentences are not for you!

If you have an area like that, I feel like you don't need full sentences at all.

While I used this example, which one could explain as intentional for various reasons. There are myriad other examples where there are dual languages being interwoven across google properties. Including minutia in one language, but the body content in another. Facebook/Meta's properties are the worst for this however and will intermingle languages frequently despite being an account-based service (literally ignoring the user's preferences in favour of IP-based guess work.)

Back to Google - Algorithmically there are likely straightforward reasons for why this is happening. Clearly the contents of the pages are composed from a mixture of sources, for reasons unknown these sources may not be able to detect or receive the localisation settings of the end user. Recent changes to privacy protections and cookie limitations may also be a contributor to these issues. Including the obvious: getting ads in the wrong language.

French native speaker here. UX consistency, shared Internet culture, habits from the early 90's and error messages I can actually find on the Web are the reasons why I always set my computing to the english language.

I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that.

On the French-language mandatory corporate Windows laptop, Excel formulas are translated in French - so when searching for recipes on the web I have to translate them !

I enjoy sites such as Thomann.de which have separate settings for language, country and units of measurement.

Tip:Pretend to be Irish. You get English, but you also get SI and euro.

> Tip:Pretend to be Irish

Best tip I've seen all day!

I just have a custom locale for any UNIX-like systems I use. American English, UTF-8, 24-hour time, RFC-3339 dates, SI units, '.' decimal point, '_' thousands separator. I call it en_ENG, for the fictional land of Engineeristan.

Mind to share your LC_ settings?

An explanation of all the valid fields can be found at [1]. Copy an existing locale, modify it to suit your needs. Don't forget to escape all characters as Unicode if you want it to support unicode. Compile & install as normal with localedef, add to `/var/lib/locales/supported.d`, run locale-gen, set the various `LC_` variables you want to use in `~/.profile` or `/etc/envionment` or whatever.

This[2] askubuntu answer goes into more detail.

[1] https://lh.2xlibre.net/locale/en_US/ [2] https://askubuntu.com/a/162714

I just use en_DK which (while not perfectly named) is exactly there to solve this.

That doesn't have `_` as the thousands separator. It uses ISO 8601 for date/times instead of RFC 3339 (so "2022-03-14T15:06:03 EDT" instead of "2022-03-14 15:06:03-04:00"), etc.

I just happen to want slightly different choices than it allows.

> I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that.

I do the same. There is usually a locale available with that, look for English (Ireland), English (Europe), English (Denmark), or English (Germany).

The problem with monolingual is the thought that there is One True Language.

It isn't so. I write half my emails in one email, the other half in another. Often emails will have sections in one language (e.g. quote from another email) and other sections in a different language.

Spelling tools must be able to detect language automatically to be of any value and be able to handle multiple languages within a single sentence!

I've managed to set my phone to accept and suggest both in English and Dutch. Works reasonably well.

I use LanguageTool [0] as an extension, it never has issues detecting if I’m currently writing in English or German. I sadly have yet to find a solution that works as well on my Android.

[0]: https://languagetool.org/

> These users will still want Google to return results in their native language.

Says who? This is a baseless assumption.

Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for. And the browser should ask the OS or the user for their language preference. And if IT-support wants one language for the interface in order to facilitate support, they can still set the other language for browser preference.

Just ignoring all settings and making blind assumptions will guarantee you will be wrong many times.

> Says who?

The browser setting that every browser sends to any server it requests data from. Usually this defaults to the system language, but you can add more languages with a priority. Mine is English (prio 1), German (prio 2), yet I for some reason get tons of spanish content as I am going back and fourth between countries these days just based on Geolocation.

I think you're indirectly agreeing with the parent (and great-grandparent); both are saying "Google (and others) shouldn't just use the IP; use the browser's language setting, and if that hasn't been set, the OS setting", which you also seem to be agreeing with.

The only one differing is the grandparent, which was asserting first that users might think showing anything other than the local language is an error, and then asserting that users want their native language, and so I'm not really certain what they're asserting since those two are not always the same (maybe that the first is the reason Google does it, the second is asserting the preferred behavior, which is nearly agreement, in that the latter is doable via OS or browser preferences).

Google has literally billions of users. There are people who are worse at using computers than anyone you've ever met.

I'm as irritated as anyone when something doesn't cater to "power users". But if we're trying to understand the reason behind the decision instead of just venting, then it's instructive to consider just how computer-illiterate the non-power-user is for a product as massive as Google Search, and how annoying characteristics may be a consequence of trying to satisfy both you and them.

This isn't about power users. This will affect anyone who finds themselves in a country with a different language. Migrants, expats, refugees, people on vacation, people living in a country with multiple official languages; there are a lot of people for whom Google's way of handling this will give bad results. And it gives bad results in a way the user can't fix. If Google listened to the language settings, the user would have some control over it.

It's a setting that you can't change. You can't override it. You can't say "yes I'm really really really sure I want Google to always be in English."

It's beyond nuts. And "catering to the computer illiterate" can't be the explanation.

At least for google.com, you can use google.com/ncr to get it[1] in English (just tested in incognito mode from a non-English location).

[1] it = the front page. No guarantees that it'll work for other parts or other Google sites like Google Maps[2]. I remember noticing years ago that even with the /ncr, when the front page had a doodle, mousing over it still showed the tooltip in the local language. Billions of dollars, and can't even program a website.

[2] Yeah it still gives me my local currency for hotels in Google Maps. I live in country A, I was visiting country B, and I needed to find a hotel in my home country A. I was logged in. Google knows my address and that my account is tied to Country A (because... Play Store region locking for content, blah blah), but it still showed me the hotel prices for the country I live in and was looking for hotels in, in the foreign currency of the place I was currently sitting at. Fuck you very much, Google!

you can use google.com/ncr to get it[1] in English

I just tried, and while the page is in English, the top search results it returned are localized results to the country I happen to live in.

> Just listen to the settings that specify what language the user wants. That's what it's for.

In case you haven't noticed: Users lie. All the time. Every day.

If Google found that "just listening to the settings in the HTTP request header" helped more users than it hurt, Google would have switched to using it a long time ago. The web is a messy place - sometimes you can't even trust a website to report its own encoding correctly.

That's okay, but when I go out of my way to actively set the language in a service's settings, shouldn't that be honored over an assumed local-by-default? Because that's what I do with Google (individually on Search and YouTube), and it somehow forgets it quite frequently.

But Google is a bit unusual in that they both produce a very popular browser and very popular sites. Even if we suppose they know it's the case internally that many people have their browsers set to English but nevertheless want results in their local language ... they're also the ones producing a browser which allows one to set the preferred language which they then disregard.

> "The local language" is already a problem. There are countries where there are multiple local/national languages!

I have this issue with Microsoft. The national language in my country is English. However, Microsoft's store defaults to a local language that I don't speak every single time. My IP is also not from a part of the country that speaks that language either.

These users will still want Google to return results in their native language.

There are several layers available to Google though -

- They could use the system language setting

- They could use the browser's language setting

- They could use the user's Google account setting if the user is logged in

Corporations could set the system language, or the browser language, and it could still be overridden by the user in their Google account if they wanted to do that. Instead though, Google chooses to geolocate the user's IP address and use that which works for no one.

But they already have a solution for this. They have a domain with the local country TLD for people who want that language. Why do they keep fucking with people accessing the english domain?

They should give people the option at the top, and repeat it as necessary. They shouldn't just assume.

That's the most annoying thing. When I travel, I still want to see stuff in imperial units, and Google just switches to Metric and stays stuck that way.

…but chances are you are logged into Gmail which should know better… its just embarrassing honestly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com