It is amazing how your view of something depends on where you are viewing it from (an insight of breathtaking brilliance I know… ). Take Google. I quite like Google. It usually gives me what I want when I ask it. I have generally used Google from the UK and tend to get redirected to google.co.uk as opposed to google.com – a bit of a pain but not a killer as I am going to interact with the site in English. Recently however I have been working in Romania. I don’t speak Romanian (apart from being able to mangle the phrase “thankyou” pretty atrouciously). Nothing on my computer would indicate that I can speak Romanian. When I try to use Google.com or (as is most frequent now days) use the embedded Google search tool in Firefox I get redirected to google.ro – and the search results are in Romanian. I am sure they are brilliant results – just unusable for me.

It makes no difference if I am signed into Google (gmail id) or not. I always get redirected and get the results in Romanian. That is a REAL nightmare. I shouldn’t have to muck around with setting preferences or any of that other stuff – it should just work. Google: dont get clever, just give me what I want.