I posted this in my blog, but wanted to post it here as well and see if I was in the wrong. Basically, I went to Google Groups this morning to ask about the seemingly growing amount of non-English results when using the "next blog" feature. This morning I surfed through 10 blogs and 4 of them were in some other language. I thought this to be a bit odd because as I understood it Blogger.com was and ENGLISH site. This isn't a Google only issue, Technorati has been doing the same thing lately. Technorati is even worse with it's results that contain nothing but several thousand question marks. Anyway, I figured I would float over to Google Groups and ask about it. The response? HAHA! Are you kidding me? I'm racist because I only speak English? W-O-W! The race card is so lame in my opinion. It's getting to the point that you can pretty much figure out a persons level of intelligence the second they cry "racism!" Sorry for the rant. It's over now. Thanks for reading.
Am I going to be a 'racist' for agreeing with you? If we english-speaking people were the minority, it wouldn't be an issue. But I think it's stupid for people to insult you when all you want is some relevent search results. I thought race was based on skin color and not language though. Is there a separate word for that? Would it be languagist?
That's what I thought as well. I even posted the definition of racism, yet she still went on about it. She even posted a link to a column she wrote about racism. I didn't bother to read it. I wasn't there for racist arguments, I was there to try and find a way to weed out results that I couldn't understand.
Blogger is NOT an exclusive English site, it is displayed to surfers in as many languages as those available for displaying Google AdSense, recognized automatically be geo-targeting. What you are getting is the result of being available just a few English blogs in comparison with those in other languages, or at least not updated as frequently as others. Sounds like a joke, but if every Chinese has a blog, English speaking people are minority. Same multilingual feature occurs with other blogs.
I understand that, but assuming that I speak several languages is a bit of a stretch and Google should really work on that. It's like calling customer service with most US companies now, you have to press an option and jump through hoops to get to an English speaking rep. Why not make it to where if you choose English as your primary language in blogger, that's all you get. Seems simple to me. But my real point here is that by only speaking English you are not in any way being racist.
Agree with you in both cases. I have several Spanish speaking writers who, due to the nature of our work, need English as primary display option when researching or contacting people, but facing similar annoyance, getting Spanish or country-related versions. With this panorama, geo-targeting is only useful to site's owners demonstrating how "clever" their software is, but in the practice is useless and annoying. We have the right to choice our language preferences and they should provide us with the tools for deciding. That has nothing to do with racism.
i speak japanese, no idea to write it. With a few hours i could translate katakana or hirohana but the chinese characters are far beyond me. I think you should be able to not get completely irrevelent data though.
Google already have a feature on their search engine to search for only English language sites, so it seems logical that they should offer the same option for their other services. People who throw around the term 'racist' with little forethought need pushing down a flight of stairs (figuratively - I would only condone actual violence for a few of them). It's a slur that automatically puts you in a position in which you feel you need to defend your good name - a cheap shot fired by simpletons who can't formulate a real thought before speaking. I speak English. I can speak enough French and German to allow me to, say, ask directions to the nearest railway station (provided, of course, that those directions include the terms 'take the second left, go around the corner, cross the bridge et voila - la gare!'). However, faced with the prospect of reading a foreign website I'd be useless. It isn't racist to avoid these sites, or wish that they weren't presented in the results. It's just that with limited time available for reading I'd rather be presented with material that I'm able to read. Who could argue?
Just a note on this fact; Google has a feature for searching English language sites, but often overriden by geo-targeting and/or clearing cookies as far as I have heard.