IP geolocation is a bad way to select a UI language

One of the better ways I think is to look at the localization settings as reported by the browser, use those as a default and allow the user to override this in an easy way.

The header that contains this information is:

  Accept-Language:

If you're into php this is the variable you'll need:

  $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]

Other platforms will have their own mechanisms to reach the headers as sent by the users browser.

Make sure that it is easy to change because your user may be more comfortable with a different language than the one that the browser reports, for instance the user could be a Spanish tourist visiting Sweden and using an internet cafe in Stockholm.

True. I remember when Pirate Bay implemented it and changed the language to Malay for me and I have to manually change it back to English. The internet, especially an international torrent site where 99% of the stuff posted are in English, is better read in English. Making it in another language is just plain annoying. If you want your audience to know that an option to change languages is available, just makes it more visible. Larger icons or a more prominent placing. Let the user choose, don't make the decision for them. If you make the decision for them, you are just insulting the user's intelligence and at the same making yourself look stupid.

Usually, when I use google I look for english content, even though I live in a spanish-speaking country. It really bugs me when I go to google.com and get redirected to the local version. It bothers me not only because I'm looking for english content, but because Google localizes search results yielding a lot of unrelated or not so relevant stuff.

All I can say is sorry. Yeah, the technology is my creation although Google doesn't use my old company's technology anymore (long story). I always tried to educate users with the proper way of implementing and using IP targeting. Doesn't mean they ever listened.

Geolocation is bad for detecting the language, the HTTP Accept-Language header is better for that. But Geolocation can be good for localising content. If I'm in Germany and search for fast food, I want to see the results in English (if possible) but they should be about German businesses.

It's impossible to get it right though because you need to decide what the user wants to see localised vs always in their home locale. Maybe another header that you could set per site like "Accept-Content-Locale" or something.

And of course, both the Accept-Language and GeoIP methods fail miserably at determining things like the user's time zone. There really should be a "home" and "roaming" locale system in browsers that sends the preferred language, time zone, localised content preference, and anything else that could be useful in generically customising content. The user could set the locale browser wide or per site.

Facebook does this. I was in Costa Rica on vacation, and went to Facebook once just to accept a friend request, and all friend requests started showing up in my email as Spanish. I know I could have changed the default, but the internet was slow, and I didn't have time. It was on an internet cafe Ubuntu machine that I checked was set to American English

As the comments on the original article mention, Google seems to be answering two different questions with geolocation. The first is which of their localized web sites to display. The second is which language to display that site in. Defaulting to the localized site almost certainly helps them comply with local censorship laws, as well as offering culturally and geographically relevant content. Once you've made that choice, displaying, say, Google Japan in English might not make very much sense, so I can see why Google has merged them.

As a frequent international traveler, I would definitely appreciate a setting that permanently locks my Google to the US site in English.

A bad way to select it for the user by default, yes, but it is a good way to help organize the drop down list by having the geolocated language be the default selection.

When your manager was in France last week, how come when he pulled up the site on his Vaio, he was not getting the French language version? He even cleared his browser cache and still got English!

Engineering can explain there is a standard way to know an HTTP client's preferred language: the Accept-Language header, and that your server already supports it: Apache had mod_negotiation activated when you first installed it, but it doesn't matter. You now have a high-priority IP geolocation/geotargeting project to do.

This sounds like the same disease that made MSIE disregard MIME type headers.

Here's a simple way to detect the UI language (for glocalization): ask your visitor for their choice. It only takes a few seconds, and it's much more reliable.

When in doubt, ask, don't assume.

So after reading through all of the comments people have left here and through some of the related links people have posted, it really sounds that most of the folks who think this is a bad idea are people who travel a lot or are above the norm in regards to tech. Face it, if you're reading HN, you're probably a geek in one form or another.

But the thing is, most people aren't. They want to go to a service and have it work for them. To talk about Google specifically, remember for a second that this is a company that is insanely driven by numbers. Remember that thing a few months ago where their lead UI guy quit because they did A/B testing on 30 different colors of blue? I can't confirm, of course, but I would put a lot of money on Google having spent a lot of time doing testing on language localization based across a lot of different parameters including user agent, geo IP, etc. And if they're using IP's, there's probably a good reason why they do.

I'll also admit that I'm an American English speaker. I can't speak a second language, but I can read Spanish(slowly) and I understand a bit of Haitian Creole if spoken slowly. The only time I've ever been out of the U.S. is to Montreal 10 years ago on vacation.

The site that pisses me off the most at the moment is ups.com. They never remember the language I select(English) and their UX is a freaking pile of crap. Every time I go their site, I get the same cramped little box where I have to pick a language. They are a prime candidate to use geo-IP detection given their global business, and yet they don't. I contrast them to Google because they're both global companies, but while Google has put millions of dollars into testing their products, UPS looks like they hired some interns 5 years ago to design their site and haven't updated it since.

"assume makes an ass out of u and me"

I cant recall the number of times I have been cursing at a website, in particular Google, when I get the whole site presented in Thai characters. Wtf?! I can't read this stuff. Give me an English button and for once, please remember my selection.

I've ranted about this exact same problem a year ago and IMHO it goes even further than just geolocation for websites, but it's also a problem with desktop applications that use the locale to determine UI language which is inconvenient and in some times even confusing as it mixes the application's UI that's in one language with UI from the OS that's in another language - sometimes even in the same dialog.

My old rant is here for those interested: http://www.gnegg.ch/2008/09/automatic-language-detection/

This redirection is not happening at application layer, perhaps due to scale?

Here's my blog post about this from about two years ago:

http://www.ordecon.com/2007/06/11/why-geolocation-by-ip-suck...

One very useful way to get around this, specially when you use both a local and the global version, is to setup a keyword search for each in your browser (in Chrome and Firefox it's pretty easy).

So for example, if I want the english Google (hl=en), I have a keyword "g", and when I want local MX content (.com.mx, hl=es), I use gmx.

Of course it's still no excuse for Google (and other companies) to offer such bad user experience.

A hotel with free internet in yurop? Impossible!

On a more serious note the author is right that it's highly annoying to be in a country where you don't understand a word and when looking for some familiarity you open the internets only to find out that they too have been translated.

I find it pretty funny to be reading all these complaints about "IP Geolocation" in ENGLISH. Really these are all variations on: "Why serving non-English pages is bad for users who only understand English."

Bing should take note of this. I hardly ever use Bing, but if enough international travelers get annoyed with Google, it won't hurt their cause.

Funny story...I was taking a multi-week trip to Europe while meanwhile attempting to finish my submission for Advanced Rails Recipes.

No problem, I figured, I'll just use Google Docs to write it from internet cafes.

I got hit by this problem. I could figure out enough French to save my work and what not, but not enough to tell Google to show me Google Docs in English!

It annoys me as much when they don't bother making a character encoding declaration and there are placemarkers all over.

Here's the dilemma put simply: If you set language based on geolocation, you'll have a tiny handful of tech savvy nerds complain about you on the internet.

If you set it based on the Accept-Language header, you'll have a bunch of non-tech savvy users not use your site because they have no idea their language is set to English in the browser.

It's a tradeoff and, unfortunately, geolocation is the best of a bunch of bad methods to determine your language.

De veras.

I absolutely despise 'location aware' software that assumes that because I've crossed the border, I want to speak that language. It happens to me with my iPhone all the time and its bothersome, frankly.

This always gets me when I'm using Tor. I usually just go to google.co.uk (is there an explicit URL for the US site?).