Indeed. Catalan speakers have Spanish forced down their throat no matter if Spanish has never been associated to the Google account in any way, nor in the system or browser language preferences.

In my case, I live in the United States, but Google is determined to serve me Spanish results even for Catalan-related queries. E.g. preferring the Spanish Wikipedia. The search engine's behavior has had ups and downs over the years, but it has never been great.

This is very much a problem for my children, who don't understand Spanish, as well as for the Catalan-speaking regions of the world that are not in Spain, including Andorra.

In my experience, Gemini easily flags any Catalan content as unsafe and prevents the conversation from continuing. Even for prompts like "summarize this article". This may have improved lately, but still.

Google used to be an example in sensitivity to the world's diversity, being a responsible major player. Way back. Now, although I applaud some efforts multiple teams continue making, it is obvious this is no longer a priority.

>In my experience, Gemini easily flags any Catalan content as unsafe and prevents the conversation from continuing.

I'm curious, what are the keywords that trigger that?

Indeed, somehow Google is the worst offender with this.

Lately they've decided that auto translating the local language into English in Maps reviews is the wrong thing to do. They translate every other language into English but somehow since I live in this place I must speak the local language too, so I don't need that in English.

Ditto for search results. Surely you want Wikipedia in the local language! I mean you've been there for so long! You search for things in the local language, surely that's a sign of your preference and not the fact that searching for things locally requires use of the local language.

This also applies to so much other "we must make our software so smart and guess all your preferences". Google fails so consistently at this I cannot understand why they persist other than some sort of misplaced corporate self regard.

I've had this argument with a Google Developer.

He told me that for efficiency, they had different stages in the content rendering and that the main page structure didn't have your user information yet. That's rubbish IMHO because the accept language header should be readily available in that phase.

I've seen similar dysfunctions in other big orgs where a feature or bugfix would need to cross team boundaries and the outcome inhabits zones of vaguely defined responsibility.

The guy you argued with sounds like they were semi-justifying this with the typical "noogler" rose colored glasses.

> He told me that for efficiency, they [had to make a broken product]

That's called premature optimization.

My worst experience was that after arriving in a new country the Play store didn't show local apps because my Google account was assigned to the old country. And changing the country wasn't easy and meant abandoning the old country and it's apps. Since I travel a bit back and forth I ended up buying a second phone and creating an account for the new country.

This is indeed extremely annoying and I never understood why so many apps are configured to only be available in specific countries. Like what at all do they stand to gain doing this?

Google will then go on to complain about users installing APKs from shady sources but this practice pushes users to do so. I'm sure a decent amount of users ended up with malware on their phones just because they wanted to install an app that wasn't available in their listed country.

You solve it the best way to fit your case I guess. On android I created a set of alternative accounts that each belong to a different country.

All accounts can be active at the same time on the same phone, there is a dropdown to switch in the Store app, and that works even with a work profile on the side. I've yet to see real downsides, except for course remembering which account is on which country and manually switching.

Thank you. I may try the same when the time comes to ditch the old phone.

Its strange that Google knows I live in the UK and speak English. When I'm signed in to a TV in a hotel room in Spain watching English YouTube videos it then shows me a Spanish advert. Just feels really silly when I don't understand it and they know full well that I don't understand it - still they can charge the advertisers.

When I was in Romania for my IELTS, I could not use Google Maps. Despite my Google account specifying my preferred languages as English, Ukrainian, Russian in that order and my Accept Language header set only to English, that was not enough to not discount those preferences as a configuration error and serve me Romanian.

Using Google search, which luckily did not decide to show me "local" results to an English query like it often does home, I found a support thread suggesting I set my Accept Language to have something other than English as a second language. Lo and behold, the page decided to now respect it.

Yeah it's amazing that Google is the worst offender.

I think this is because half of Google live their entire career in California, so they don't know about other languages, units, time zones at all.

It's weird, because they employ SO many foreigners, bringing them to California. But somehow upon arrival they all get memory wiped about the existence of anything outside the bay area.

Other companies do this right. Google is user hostile.

No. I will NEVER navigate by bike, foot, or public transport in these strange America-only units.

About a decade ago Google decided that all maps in Finland should have the street names in Swedish.

Which is kinda valid, in the southern and south-western parts this is done because there is a significant Swedish-speaking minority so most cities and streets have names in both languages.

But at the time I lived in central Finland, where the streets DIDN'T have official Swedish names, they just ... translated them. Which was super fun for navigating.

That's so annoying, every time I'm on a new device/browser, Google and all their services start in Hebrew. Even though I'm signed in and have changed it to English a million times already. It's not that I can't read it, I'd just rather have everything in a universal language rather than a translation

What incentives does Google have to improve UX in this way? I absolutely agree that it should be the case, but the people for whom it matters are (1) completely insignificant wrt to the whole user base and (2) mostly care about tracking and try to circumvent it.

There are 700+ million people living in Europe. The countries are tiny, most have bunch of official languages. The fix would be to use users selected language and not to flip flop it based on location. IP based location guessing doesn’t work even down to right country in here.

That is not an incentive. There is nothing in to for Google.

It is of course useful for those 700+million, but they are not customers of Google, they users/the product. So long as you won't go elsewhere (in mass) you don't matter.

They have the same incentive as they have for adding localization in the the first place.

>(1) completely insignificant wrt to the whole user base and

At any one time, there's got to be tens of millions of people accessing Google from a country which has a primary language unknown to the traveller. Even if this number is insignificant compared to Google's full user base, the cost for Google to service 20-30mn people with a feature is presumably lower than their annual ad revenues across 20-30mn people.

Sad fact: most people don’t go anywhere.

People like us are an edge case.

One don't need to travel to be multilingual.

Many EU country have more than one official languages.

Most previous colony is bilingual.

I was replying to doix, not TFA.

Still applies. I don't want to have google forcing the "local" language on me even in the country I live in (which is also the country on my passport).