This isn't a new thing. Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. I was at Google at the time they first started doing this, and it was somewhat controversial.
The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.
If I'm in Denmark, and I've got an en-US browser setting it can be because I am visiting Denmark, in which case I probably don't know the language, or two because I have made a conscious effort to get an English version of the browser.
In short if your location has a different default language setting than what you are sending, what you are sending is probably what you really prefer.
> in which case I probably don't know the language, or two because I have made a conscious effort to get an English version of the browser.
...or because your browser defaults to sending en-US even though you're using a Danish-localized browser on a Danish operating system, as described by the parent comment.
I don't think you've read the parent comment very closely, if I'm mistaken please point out to me where they exactly discuss localization of browsers and Danish operating systems? Those are factors you've put into your definition of what by default means.
It is however not what I experience when I look at my Danish localized firefox because it sends da-DK by default, and my english browser sends en-Us, because I took the effort to make it so, because I don't much like the Danish language for UI.
I admit this is just a quick look over of the different language browsers I have on my system. What do the different language browsers on your system do that you feel so confident in telling me to pay more attention to the parent comment?
> many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language
Indicating that "the user's actual language" and "en-US" are different. Yes, I extrapolated this to both the browser and the operating system having a different language, maybe it was just one or the other.
> What do the different language browsers on your system
From the parent comment:
> Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. [...] The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was [...]
I don't have any 20 years old browsers to test with, I'm afraid.
If someone has been doing something for 20 years the normal interpretation of that would be they started doing it 20 years ago and are still doing it, and you probably don't need 20 year old browsers to actually test it.
> If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.
Thank you so very much for this tip! I don't use cookies and live in a non-English country so I've been clicking that yellow "change to English results" button for at least half a decade now, numerous times a day, every day. Switching to en-GB indeed makes Google respect my language choice.
Not kidding, you've just saved me thousands and thousands of clicks and small annoyances.
Google was the most major annoyance when I was expat, as it would default to an alphabet I could barely read. Trying to find the 'English' setting at the time was a nightmare.
I'm surprised browsers haven't addressed this yet, by adding an extra header stating if the locale is in the default setting or if the user has explicitly configured it.
I feel like this makes sense and probably needs to be applied more broadly.
Default settings need to be treated as the lack of a choice rather than an explicit choice for the default. So much software doesn’t make this distinction apparent and makes peoples’, usually users’, lives difficult.
If “agree to send me promotional email” is the default (and is gross but that’s not really the point here) you’re missing out on good data knowing who explicitly chose it. If the new version of a software has a setting with a new default but you can’t change it on upgrade because you don’t what users explicitly chose then you wind up with this weird case where version Y fresh and version Y from X behave differently. Maddening for debugging and support.
The problem is that there's no way to explicitly say you want "en-US". If you're in a non-English speaking country and your Accept-Language is "en-US" then you're going to get the "local" language.
To make matters worse, Google uses ccTLDs for everywhere except the US. google.us just redirects to google.com, and google.com uses your IP to figure out your country, so you can't even use the domain as a workaround.
This rationalization may have been valid at the time, but certainly the software has changed in the intervening 20 years such that it is very likely that the user configured their OS and environment to their preferred language weights -- at least their preferred primary language.
Given Google's wanton dropping support for RFC-compliant HTTPS in the name of changing times, certainly they should be open to changing this policy with the appropriate data.
The results you get are very much dependant on where you are visiting from. I can set my everything to Japanese, both in my browser, OS and my Google user account and search via google.co.jp - but if I am not in Japan, results will be skewed away from Japanese websites.
For example: The other day I wanted to find the lyrics for the Japanese version of a song, so I typed "[song name] 歌詞" and because Google knows that 歌詞 means lyrics, and it can see I'm in Europe, my top result was an English lyric site, with the original version of the lyrics and no mention of the Japanese word from my search term. Technically, that is really impressive, but kinda useless.
On top of that, it can sometimes be impossible to visit help or product pages if you happen to be in the wrong country.
I'm in the USA and get Japanese results when I search for things in Japanese. Google has settings for both region and search result language, I would try setting those.
It’s not that you don’t get Japanese results - adding a few more words to the query got the result I needed. It’s how about how far they force their localization on users.
> The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language.
Sounds like a potential workaround is to set your language to another flavour of English like "en-CA" or "en-GB".
Exactly right. A modern website is one that knows that the browser's configured language is the best way to determine the user's language. A website that uses location to determine language is hopelessly outdated.
I never completely agreed with the rationale for using location, but 15-20 years ago I at least found it understandable...Internet Cafes and borrowing your host's desktop computer were more common scenarios then. Today they're rare enough that I can't understand why anyone would accommodate those scenarios over the scenario of someone traveling with their own device.
As I stated in the comment you quoted from, this was about 20 years ago. Also, Chrome is made by Google, so it seems entirely reasonable that someone fixed a problem they found annoying about browsers. (At the same time, Google is so big now that they may continue ignoring "en-US" because of momentum and/or because no-one remembers the original reason behind that decision.)
The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.