DMA Delays Email Guidelines... Again >>
<< A Business Out Of Thin Air
 tdicon 


(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Mon, Aug 4th 2003 12:44am





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..


If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...
 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1.  

    When will see search engines on foreign terms?

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Aug 4th, 2003 @ 3:29am

    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 | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    well it is an option, but the other way around

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Aug 4th, 2003 @ 8:41am

    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 | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    country home pages

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Aug 4th, 2003 @ 10:24pm

    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 | link to this | view in thread ]


Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Save me a cookie
  • Note: A CRLF will be replaced by a break tag (<br>), all other allowable HTML will remain intact
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>


DMA Delays Email Guidelines... Again >>
<< A Business Out Of Thin Air
 tdicon 

A word from our Sponsors...
Follow Techdirt
Flattr rss rss

Powered by Postrank

From the Techdirt Archive...
A word from our Sponsors...

Close

Email This