DISQUS

andymurd · 11 months ago

Georedirecting can also fail spectacularly.

A train company here in the UK provides free wifi on its long distance services, which is great but... the internet is delivered via a satellite link to a Swedish ISP. So, I'm sat on a train to London trying to decypher google.se.

schammy · 11 months ago

Agreed. I live in the US so I don't think there's even been one time I've had to deal with this problem personally - but this is far from the first complaint I've heard about it. People who live outside the US know the difference between ".com" and "dot their country". Let them choose which one they want! :P

Jamie Brammer · 11 months ago

Good post. Surely one the basic rules of usability is to do as the user expects - when I type in Google.com I expect to get there not be redirected to some other version that has a completely different set of search results. I'd have expected better things from Google and Yahoo but their days of altruism are over now and they're really focusing on the money not the users.

Bjorn Stromberg · 11 months ago

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It's my connection, I know what I typed in, why do you presume to know what I want? Personally I'm boycotting Hulu, Pandora, MTV, and any other dinosaur's service that does geo-restriction. This is the world-wide-web and it means just that: it's world-wide. Get with the program people~

Mike · 11 months ago

Totally agree with you on this. I am in Thailand now and it is frustrating seeing menus in Thai. Why can't there be an option in Google to only show stuff in English. Yahoo is also bad when signing up for accounts. Why can't they just add a link to the English version. Very frustrating.

doshiamit · 11 months ago

This pisses me off to no end. An even bigger annoyance is how it works with the Firefox search field. At lest in the browser it will take me to google.com by clicking on a link. The firefox search field always takes me to the India version, and I almost never want the Indian version. I am less annoyed by yahoo, cause its content, but google is search. why mess around with this on search?

beamer · 11 months ago

I stumbled this for you. I didn't realize this was such a problem. Thanks for sharing.

Beamer

Brandon J. Mendelson · 11 months ago

I couldn't agree more.

The problem is: Advertisers buy American websites, not Australian. So the tech companies, which are essentially advertising firms, need different sources of income. That's why Australians get a different web experience then Americans (as an example.)

It's dumb, but that's the logic they use. Having attempted to purchase advertising on a mass scale via Google and others. I can vouch for this.