Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

kelly — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:04:33 -0000

how about this one, i'm from america, and never left america with my lap top, but i am a CDL truck driver, and i just got back from laredo, and when i was in laredo TX i visited google, and it sent me to the http:\\www.google.com.mx, i thought ok, well the router for the company i work for must be useing a mexico IP, no big deal, but now i'm in Dallas TX and google is still comeing up to the spanis version.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Andrew — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:15:49 -0000

It took me a while to find this, but from japan I do the following:
For blogger in english... I am able to get to the english blogger http://help.blogger.com/bin...

For google in English:
http://www.google.com/ncr

Hope this helps anyone as frustrated as I was!
-ac

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

John — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:00:16 -0000

Yeah, it is even more fun in Asia. What annoys me more than just the cookie issue is that I'm often logged in, and it is showing my gmail address at the top of the page to prove it knows who I am, but still it feels I need the entire experience in Japanese or Korean because I happen to be in a hotel there! Perhaps it is an attempt to get us all speaking foreign languages :-)

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Christian Gross — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:54:05 -0000

LOL I am laughing my head off here. Just at SDExpo there was the user interface "GURU" who applauded Google for coming up with such a brilliant user interface. I am not kidding!

Personally I always thought it was garbage because if you don't switch languages and do a search for say "Microsoft Windows." You will get all of the results for that language. DUMB DIMB...

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Greg — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 03:36:05 -0000

I'm in the same country Steph is, but in a part that speaks German, not French or Italian. Google decides that I want German pages. Oh, not just on google.com, but on a number of other services. I'm using blogger, every time I visit, I get German until I log in. I've set my preferences to give me English, but I still get German until I log in. I'm not going to blogger.ch, or blogger.de, but blogger.com

And the ads. I often see ads for GREEN CARDS! I'm American, I don't need a green card. While I can read and speak German, I'm not likely going to click on a German language ad. Then again, I'm not going to click on an English ad either.

I have set my browser for language preferences, but google doesn't pay any attention to these either.

Google _GETS_ a lot of things, but they need to be severely pounded over the head with a clue stick on dealing with multiple languages.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Steph — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:15:29 -0000

This is the kind of thing that brought me to http://www.reboot.dk/artefa... and http://climbtothestars.org/... (with video of talk).

I hear you, Robert.

Particularly, take a look at my "country != language" slide in my reboot presentation.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

ebarrera — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:10:50 -0000

Well, I live in France but I like to have all my content in English, the fisrt thing I do after installing FireFOx in any COmputer is changing my setting to English (and no EN-US) everything works fine after that. Also you may try to keep you logged in with you Google Account (that helps a bunch) and change your setting in the setting of Google.

DO all this just once and you're free to enjoy all Google's Content in any languange you fancy.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

pg — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 10:35:39 -0000

I have a similar problem. I prefer to use Google menus and commands in English (rather than in Swedish) as this gives me more options; but this has the unfortunate effect that when I search for Swedish companies in Google News I get a ton of English-language links on top. (I really didn't even see the problem until I opened Google News in an IE tab in Firefox and ran the same searches, with entirely different results.)

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

francine hardaway — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:33:54 -0000

Wait until you see Google in Thai! I'm in Bangkok and it defaults to Thai. Worst, either the ISP in the hotel or somebody blogs YouTube altogether. And the entire country seems to be on dialup. So I can't post to Google Video either.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Matt Cutts — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:23:05 -0000

Skip, the Reader team is keeping everyone informed here:
http://groups.google.com/gr...
Looks like everyone's feeds should be back, but I know the Reader team will be digging into what happened.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Jill — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:48:54 -0000

Google also still doesn't tend to serve up very relevant ads! I wish they did.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Beau — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:39:43 -0000

I lost all my feeds too. This seems to be a bit of a problem:

http://groups.google.com/gr...

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Skip — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:54:23 -0000

Arg. Google Reader seems to have lost all my subscriptions. I hope this is just a temporary glitch. If not, it's going to be really painful to recreate them.

This might prompt me to switch to an offline one, where at least I can backup settings and such.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Priit Pirita — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:02:48 -0000

Hi, Matt Cutts - but what to do when you try to comment on someones blogspot, being let's say in Mexico and the whole standard blogger 2.0 comment page is, oops, in spanish. Where is the link now? It took me 30 minutes, I'm not stupid, I almost give up.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Matt Cutts — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:39:53 -0000

Are you in Mexico? If so, go to the bottom of google.com and look for the "Google.com in English" link. Clicking that will remember that you want Google in English, not one of those other languages. :)

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Jason Truesdell — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:28:20 -0000

I remember a Google guy being very proud of this when I was asked if I knew how Google picks which language to display for the search page. I had some personal experience with this useless technical solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Although I think I mentioned this isn't always the best user experience, I guess I was too polite to say that this has irritated me immensely when traveling to Asia. I'd much rather the service respect my language preferences... as long as a user's Windows (or MacOS) language settings are right, the browser default "accept-language" headers should work for almost everyone, and that's more than you can say for the Google solution.

The only time the Google approach helps is for disambiguating which market to use (English-Canada vs. English-US, for example). And in that case, it should just be a secondary factor.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Tech Povera — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:23:31 -0000

I had similar (sucky) experience with amazon's personalization about a month ago. My 2 cents here: http://www.techpovera.com/b...

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

girish — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:04:18 -0000

You pointed out the sites that disappointed you. Were there any sites which did what you expected?

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

descapa — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:07:09 -0000

This always happened to me when I lived in Europe. This was only a problem on new computer or after I cleared cookies. I just typed:
http://www.google.com/ncr

(ncr == no country redirect)

It worked well for me...buena suerte!

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

sean — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:59:02 -0000

Robert, I have to agree with LayZ above... get off the grid when you're in Cabo. You even said you'd do so in your post just before you left. You'll live and your readers will still love you when you return.

But on topic:
I SECOND THAT! Listen up GOOGLE!!! When I was skiing in Whistler (yep, got on the grid), I kept getting Canadian Google, which sucked. It's simple, just provide a country and language preference in my google profile.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

LayZ — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:49:21 -0000

You're in CABO for God's sake!! What the HELL are you doing surfing the internet? You should surfing the ocean! :-)

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

ichris — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:45:35 -0000

I found this annoying as well - I was trying to demonstrate how easy my dad's life would be if he switched from hotmail to using gmail and associated apps. Needless to say my dad is still using hotmail.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Gamermk — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:45:02 -0000

I agree that it's silly they do this. I've been using Google Suggest the past year or so and I find it to be a much stronger solution than regular, old, re-direct ya to spanish Google.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

David Dalka — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:37:01 -0000

Nice post.

Re: Google (and other sites) sucks for travelers

Eber Irigoyen — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:34:09 -0000

that's a feature =o)

you have to specify "no country"

http://www.google.com/ncr