Comment by junto

2 years ago

As someone that lives in a country where the national language is not my first language, I hate websites that use IP location to make assumptions about my choice of language and it being forced on me based on a lazy assumption, when my browser is sending language headers quite clearly, and they are ignored.

4 comments

junto

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reincoder  2 years ago

I work for an IP geolocations service, even I hate this thing.

They call it "web experience personalization" in the industry, and it is annoying. I have never recommended anyone to do that. The best way to do website personalization through IP geolocation:

- Taxes and stuff (if applicable)

- Delivery costs (if applicable)

- Putting the user's country first in those country selection drop-down menu

And that's about it from the top of my head. In my experience, these translations never work and only create distractions. Regardless of the positive intention the website has, using Google Translate to create a native language version of the website is just not a good idea.

  • junto  2 years ago

    A fair number of popular internationalization frameworks also drive the idea that region and language are fixed pairs.

    The example I often use to illustrate this problem is that there are roughly 4 million Norwegian speakers in the world, but 14 million speakers of Catalan. Visit an international website in Spain and you rarely get given the option to have it in Catalan.

    Good example is Amazon.es https://www.amazon.es/customer-preferences/edit?from=mobile&...

hedora  2 years ago

I live in the US, and IP geolocation points to the incorrect regions (plural) on all my devices.

Few technologies manage to make my day-to-day internet experience than these sorts of databases.

I wish they would just go away.

Websites could just ask me my zipcode on first load instead of guessing it wrong every single time and then burying the flow to fix it behind multiple links and page loads.

Also: There is no way to fix the database to produce the “correct” or “better” answer. I rarely want a website to use my current location.

Instead, I check inventory for stores in places where I will be. This whole space is trying to solve an ill-posed problem.