(Mis)Uses of Technology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick




Google Force-Feeding Indian Language Sites Upsetting To Some

from the you-must-go-here dept

Google made a small amount of news last week for launching an India-specific site. However, it sounds like not everything went as smoothly as they hoped. Some people in India are complaining about the way the site was launched, and the fact that it forced browsers from India to go to the localized site, often displaying text in gibberish characters, if the browser didn't have the proper language fonts installed. As the complaining article points out, the results are all still completely in English, so why would they force the homepage to show up in a non-English language? Furthermore, why should they assume that Indian surfers going to Google don't want plain old Google, and forcing them to go to the localized one? Why not just make it an option? If they can tell that they're coming from India, how hard would it be to just include a prominent link telling visitors about the new localized Google instead?

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

    Aug 4th, 2003 @ 3:29am
  • When will see search engines on foreign terms?

    by Anonymous Coward

    For all the talk about IT jobs going to India, when will we start seeing major software applications designed and built by Indians? Search engines that operate on the terms of other cultures, languages, requiring a knowledge of their culture to understand it. An Islamic search engine might require intricate knowledge of the Koran or its parables, for example.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  • Aug 4th, 2003 @ 8:41am
  • well it is an option, but the other way around

    by Anonymous Coward

    just coming from italy, I used google a few times, and when you first goto google.com it fowards you to the italian version of the site, but below the searchfield there is the option for the english version of the site, once you click on that, google remembers (cookie) your choice, and next time you goto google.com again (from italy) it'll jump you to the english site. Unless of coures, I read your post incorrectly.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  • Aug 4th, 2003 @ 10:24pm
  • country home pages

    by Anonymous Coward

    I think at the bottom right of every country home page like google.co.in, there's a link at the bottom right that says "go to google.com" or something. If you click that, from then on you'll go straight to www.google.com in the future..

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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