We have a problem with Google in Germany since Google apparently redirects the Google.com URL to the Google home page of the country of the location of the computer or server. Worse, even when one is diverted here in Germany to Google.de and selects the option "English" in the language preferences, it remains the Google Germany home page, even though it is in English. This is apparently done to direct local advertising to local users.
The solution here is the following link
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en
which takes one to the original Google.com U.S. site in English.
However, this kind of a fudge should not be necessary. The user is quite aware that he can reach Google Germany by using the google.de URL address so that there is no reason to redirect such a user to google.de if google.com is the address which the user has typed in or clicked as a URL.
We have the same problem with AOL by the way, which is keyed to the language of the browser used. For AOL, we thus use our English-language Mozilla Firefox version, because AOL under IE otherwise redirects us to the German pages of AOL, even though we explicitly select aol.com and not aol.de. The reason for this is that the language of the Internet Explorer installation is tied to the language of the Microsoft Windows version installed on the computer. If you buy a computer in e.g. Germany, the default versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system and IE browser are all in German and there is no way to get English versions, which makes Internet Explorer a washout for AOL overseas.
In any case, go here for the real true Google.com website in English.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
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