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Friday, October 02, 2015

On Ignored Users Spoken Language

I think I've talked already few times about this problems but I don't see anything happening ... actually, it's getting worst and worst.

Who Is Directly Affected And Is Wasting Money

  • Companies paying for Online Advertisement
  • Companies selling online
  • Companies providing online services

Who Is Responsible

  • every service that is addressing users through their current IP address, without asking permission, and assuming if you travel to any country in this world you automatically speak that country language
  • every service that completely ignores Accept-Language on the server side, and navigator.language on the client side
This is an extract from the Accept-Language used for locale setting post directly from W3C website:
For a first contact, using the Accept-Language value to infer regional settings may be a good starting point, but be sure to allow them to change the language as needed and specify their cultural settings more exactly if necessary. Store the results in a database or a cookie for later visits.
...
By the way
Using the Accept-Language header is also a good starting point for determining the language of the user, rather than the locale ...
Accordingly, instead using users IP location to define their language, I'd rather prefer them to use my daily language of choice, which comes most likely from the fact that my entire Operating System speaks English, as example, so PLEASE, give me English content whenever I am!

It feels so straightforward simple thing, right? Wondering who is doing it right?

Nobody Is Doing It Right

I am in Germany these days, and suddenly I don't understand anything. I cannot even be "victim" of Ads, I'm rather disturbed by them.

Google

Before even asking to use my detailed location provided through the browser, if I type google.com in the URL bar I'm redirected to google.de. Why does that happen? Simple, they know by my IP I am in Germany ^_^.
If I choose the English language and I search for O2 DSL, imagining I'd like to sign for a contract, or need some help, this is the result:

...which is completely useless. Probably most of the resulting sites also have an English page equivalent, and if I go there probably Chromium will ask me to translate the language ... but how come I don't have translated previews?
How come there are specifications about this problem but nobody is using meta information that exposes all supported languages, so that eventually a search result could tell me upfront if the target site supports English, as example, and I can eventually go and try to read it, instead of trusting just an automatic translation that we all know is rarely that reliable?

It's not all that bad though, things are improving at least on Google side. While in Germany, I've managed to watch an English movie through Google Play and I'm actually happy because last time I've tried, it did accept my payment but it didn't let me watch it because not allowed in that location.
Still room for improvement all over but progress too!

Facebook

While Google might be an online service in the wild, Facebook actually perfectly knows which language I speak: is the one I use to use Facebook, no crystal ball involved. Regardless, somebody is wasting money trying to target me and I'v e no idea what are trying to sell.

Twitter

I've always said that one of the best things Twitter does about advertising is targeting properly so that it's the only service where I actually want to click on Ads, and not just by accident, because these are always relevant and also it's not immediately obvious that these are ads, but I'm usually interested anyway ... so kudos that!
But now that I am in Germany, I've realized there's quite a lot of advertisement in my stream, and I cannot even understand it anymore. Do people pay by impressions? Well, all of mine during these days shouldn't probably count as one.