Google sucks!
April 29th, 2007
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.
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2 Comments Add your own
1. James Kavanagh | May 24th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
I had exactly the same problem when I was in Madeira! A real pain. Methinks these systems are sometimes too clever for their own good!
As you mention it should be fairly straightforward for them to interrogate your browser and work out your locale settings etc.
Another good one I had was that my bank (based in the UK) wouldn’t authorise online payments cos it thought I shouldn’t be able to do that from there! Have you come across that one yet?
Man that was frustrating :-#
Rant over and out….
2. Ewan | May 25th, 2007 at 6:49 am
I think IP addresses are genereally an absymal way of deciding what content to give to people. I can think of a couple of legal reasons why you would use them but generally I think they should be avoided.
And who would have thought that a client of an online bank would want to use their account online - revolutionary thought eh?
(I think the thing we should learn from this is not to trust anyone who deals with online funding systems
lol )
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