[thelist] Multiple-language sites

[Richard Bennett]

Hi,
Also jumping in late - today I received a reply from Google (took 2 days -
not bad!), after sending user feedback, a few quotes:

my message:
"Google is a great search-engine, I use it many times a day.
One thing though is extremely irritating, and that is the auto-redirect to
localized versions, depending on which browser I use.
If I type in www.google.com , that is where I want to go - NOT to
www.google.be .
And if I don't select another language, it's because I want to use
English.
Please stop this "thinking for the user" - I'm sure you get it wrong more
often than not."

Some of the response:
Thank you for writing to Google. At Google we recently started using
IP-address detection to help our users find our international destination
sites. Unfortunately, our IP-address detection is not perfect and you are
seeing the results of this. We are working to improve our IP detection
<snip>We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you...

Sadly my mail didn't persuade them to ditch the whole detection thing, as
they seem to have missed the point - their script is fine, I just prefer not
to use the language of the country I'm located in, while on Google.
Also, the question rises, - why would they use IP detection? That would lead
me to believe they researched the alternatives, and found them unreliable...

Cheers,
Richard.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hassan Schroeder" <hassan at webtuitive.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 10:12 PM
Subject: Re: [thelist] Multiple-language sites


Katie Kearns wrote:

> >  - We never found a reliable way to detect peoples' browser languages.
>
> Oh well! ;)

Sorry to jump into this late, but I'm working on a two-language site
right now, and downloaded Netscape 6 in Spanish and German versions
to use for testing.

Apache's mod_negotiation
    [ see: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_negotiation.html ]

seems to do a reliable job of sending a directory-level request for