But I Don’t Read Japanese
(Full disclosure: I have a familial Yahoo! bias.) I’m all for software trying to “do the right thing,” but this is just silly. I’m sitting here in Japan and do a quick search on Google. (For some reason my Firefox insists on switching back to Google every now and then. I’m sure it’s me, but I don’t know what I’m doing.) It gives me results from google.co.jp… in Japanese. That makes sense, and I’ve noticed this behavior in many other places as well. Only one problem. I can’t make it give me English results. I type in google.com, changed the URL, and it keeps sending me to co.jp. I figure that one of the links is preferences, but the language list is in Japanese as well. Luckily (?) the internationally popular “Elmer Fudd” language is written in English.
Be vewwy, vewwy quiet…
Tara said,
November 8, 2005 @ 2:15 pm
Which is weird, because from here, I can google from any of the international google sites. I wonder if it has to do with different search engine requirements. Like doesn’t China require them to not let you see pages with certain words or something? So maybe they don’t let you get around that just by typing in the American url…
Olivia said,
November 8, 2005 @ 11:08 pm
This is bizarre, and really, really funny. I so wanted to know what I could read in Elmer Fudd, but it looks like in the US google.co.jp has a link to “Google.com in English” in the bottom right and no sign of Elmer…
Lee said,
November 11, 2005 @ 11:40 am
You might try going to http://google.com/en
I know that going to http://google.com/es changes the interface to espanol.
Oren said,
November 13, 2005 @ 6:43 pm
Ah, /en is the way to go. Once in Elmer Fudd, it was easy to switch to english at least.
I swear that in the past at the bottom I saw a linke that said something like “looking for the english version?”.