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?
Comments on “Google Force-Feeding Indian Language Sites Upsetting To Some”
When will see search engines on foreign terms?
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.
well it is an option, but the other way around
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.
country home pages
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 http://www.google.com in the future..