Aral Balkan

You're in Germany... no I'm not!

Google's country autodetection is borked. Whenever I access the Internet through a T-Mobile WiFi Hotspot in the UK, it thinks that I'm in Germany. I get a lovely German interface for Google services that I don't understand a word of and, here's the worst bit, there's no option for me to tell Google that I'm not in Germany. In other words, there's no Manual Override.

Manual overrides and dilithium crystals

Any Star Trek fan will tell you how important a manual override is, even in the 24th century (realigning the dilithium crystals also helps).

Software is never infallible (you write software with zero bugs? you lie!) and not providing a manual override for your latest Spiffy Automagic Feature doesn't make you a confident programmer, it just makes your interface arrogant. Especially when it fails.

Evolving software through feedback

There's nothing wrong with having something as difficult as automatic country detection failing. It's how software is built. You build it. People hit it in ways you never thought of. You evolve it. That's all cool. But it does mean that you need to build feedback mechanisms into your software so that your systems can learn.

The most important first step to evolving software, is to be notified that you have a problem. Since there is no feedback mechanism on Google's web page, I cannot tell them that their country detection is malfunctioning for me. A simple feedback link would satisfy this requirement.

The second step, regardless of how Fugginawesometastic your powers of automatic detection are, is to provide a manual override of some sort. For example, Google could ask you which language (not country) you want to experience their site in.

Finally, with regards to localization in general, it's quite an assumption to base someone's interface language on the country that they currently happen to be located in. Here's a lovely bit of advice from an unlikely source: in a Benny Hill sketch, Hill's character explains why you should never "assume" (because you make an "ass" out of "u" and "me"). I could, for example, be traveling through Germany or be an expat living in Germany who still prefers English to German. In other words, even if the country autodetection was working correctly, I could have legitimate reasons for not wanting my interface in German.

The solution to this problem is so simple (implement a manual override) that I hope Google gets round to fixing it sooner rather than later.

In the meanwhile, if you're not really located in the Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan like Google thinks you are, and you want to access the site in English, you can use this direct link: http://www.google.com/intl/en/.

Have your say!

As in all things, my approach to blog posts is that they should evolve over time and your feedback is invaluable in achieving this by helping me fix factual errors, fill in details, and expand the original post.

Has Google's country autodetection failed for you? Do you think it's spiffy as-is? Have I missed something? Leave me a comment and let me know!

Comments

• It might be for legal reasons. just like the Singularity conference was renamed to HEAD doe to legal concerns. Also I was always able to search on google.fr, google.de, google.co.uk , etc.. without being redirected. In addition in all the Google services I can choose the language I want to see the interface in, so.. I can browse anytime google.es in Chineese!

  by Ncu on 2008-11-14 00:21:33

• Hey Rob, Maybe that screenshot wasn't the best example (as you point out, they may be legally oblidged to filter by IP address when it comes to using the gmail name), however, the same thing holds true for all Google services. The home page appears in German, as do all the Google apps.

  by Aral on 2008-11-13 21:39:07

• Exactly! I've got the same problem with the Facebook application on my ipod touch. Being from Belgium, it suddenly decided to switch the entire app over to a french language version - unaware of the fact that Belgium has a rather large dutch-speaking population, or of the fact that I actually prefer english! I've looked everywhere, and there is no button or option anywhere to manually override the language settings. I'm all for localisation, but make it user controlled! Sometimes we prefer to read a site in the language in which it was originally written, rather than in a (sometimes) sloppily or inaccurately translated version.

  by Gilles Vandenoostende on 2008-11-13 15:24:27

• I expect they are legally obliged to NOT provide gmail to anyone from a German IP address, rather than "in Germany", otherwise they would have no way to be sure. Really you should be having a go at T-Mobile. Away from issues that have legal considerations I agree! When I go to France on holiday I don't want to second guess Google... I mean not everyone in France or even England speak the native language!!!

  by Rob on 2008-11-13 15:30:56

• I had this problem too, but only when connected to a T-Mobile WiFi Hotspot in Starbucks. Strange. Agree that manual override is essential. Only Google would put the knowledge of a computer above the knowledge of a human!

  by Rebecca Cottrell on 2008-11-14 10:31:32

• Thousands of Western expats in Thailand are now getting forced to see the Google Search Thai version with many entries in unreadable Thai language. The only way out is to connect to proper Google.com results over a proxy server.

  by Buck Wild on 2009-05-29 16:56:03

• The style of writing is very familiar . Did you write guest posts for other bloggers?

  by How to Get Six Pack Fast on 2009-04-15 16:11:44

• I have a similar issue when I bring my laptop from the US to Paris. Even when *logged in* my UI and results in Google are in French (Google.com forwarded to Google.fr), and i'm forced to fumble around in a foreign language prefs screen to restore. Even worse, my search behavior feels totally different searching "English pages" on Google.fr vs just plain search via Google.com. Lots of French words in the top ten pages, and the results are much less useful to me. This seems like a pretty easy issue to avoid: 1) provide a manual override as suggested above and 2) if a user is logged in for God's sake don't switch the UI and language out from under them. Pretty simple.

  by Gene on 2009-01-17 14:33:23

• Why don't we all just be honest with ourselves and admit it???? Google is exactly the 'BIG BROTHER' (in the making) that we all feared and were warned against in the first Apple computer's BIG BROTHER ads. This "geo-location" BS (it's not even a subtle hint...it's a "in your face", "tough sh*t! What can you do anyway?" complete disregard for right of privacy) cannot be anymore clearer that Google is exactly BIG BROTHER in the making! And the stupidity of it...It's amazing. I mean...didn't it occur to anyone working at Google that there are countless internet users around the world that whose preferred language of internet us is not the one spoken locally? They are called expatriates or people of foreign origins whose number since globalization or even before which have now exploded to the point that if disregarded by any technological innovation, it clearly demonstrates the team or even the company of such innovation is made up of morons who are not sophisticated enough to incorporate this fact-of-reality into their design, and thus their design should be recognized as "obsoleted the minute it was introduced", i.e an inferior design, or "the malevolent act of introducing a design clearly inferior and insufficient before it was made sufficient and caught-up with the times". Conclusion: Google is THE BIG BROTHER in the making, and it's a very poor and outright shamelessly pathetic and humiliating attempt at that. It should be deemed the shame of human technology to see such disregard for "high standard", and does not bode well for the wrongs that future technological "advancements" will bring to humanity.

  by google bites on 2009-06-30 05:51:06

• In Italy, the part where they speak German, I am British and speak some German and no Italian.... so far get sent to the Italian version of: google, yahoo, wikipedia, chrome "google address bar search", hotmail... sure there are more waiting... not sure it's a big brother thing, just bad software design, like everybody who is IN a country is FROM that country...

  by Dave on 2009-08-24 17:43:03