In Helvetica now
I have many things I would like to write about, but I figured I would take a few seconds to express my annoyance that because my hostname now ends in ».ch«, Google automatically assumes that I want my interface and searches to be in German by default. Which I probably also really annoys the third of the country where German is not the primary language.
Alan Schmitt said,
November 29, 2007 @ 5:49 am
Stop playing with my mind: after reading the title, I had thought you had switched fonts on your blog
So how do you like Switzerland? “Fondue forks for everybody”?
brian said,
November 29, 2007 @ 7:39 am
Yeah, I had a similar problem with Google when I was in Italy. At least they provide a way to set your language preference.
Karl said,
November 29, 2007 @ 9:34 am
Whereas I had a similar problem with getting the correct association for Helvetica. Especially since it’s you.
washburn said,
November 30, 2007 @ 5:48 am
@ Alan and Karl
The pun was too good to pass up.
@ Brian
Doesn’t that require logging in, or at least keeping a cookie around?
brian said,
November 30, 2007 @ 5:55 am
@ washburn
Yes, but I already use Google Reader on a daily basis.
Joshua Dunfield said,
November 30, 2007 @ 8:24 pm
It uses the hostname? That’s silly. I assumed it used the language (locale?) list in the HTTP request header, because when I had OS X set to French, Google used to come up in French.
washburn said,
December 2, 2007 @ 12:30 pm
@ Joshua
It is possible that it will use both sorts of information. It is probable that for .ca Google will return English by default, but because you had set OS X to French, the “accept-language” header indicated that you would accept French and therefore it defaulted to that.
I could imagine that by default most web browsers in Switzerland are not sending the correct “accept-language” headers, so that Google just went with German as a good guess. At least my freshly configured Ubuntu workstation sends “en-us, en” for “accept-language”. No matter how I set the locale on the command line, Firefox still reports “en-us, en”, so there may be some Firefox stupidity involved here too.
Tobias said,
December 3, 2007 @ 12:03 pm
I assume you mean Helvetia (no c). With c it’s an adjective; or a font.
washburn said,
December 3, 2007 @ 12:05 pm
@ Tobias
I think it comes from a combination of simply dropping the “Confoederatio” prefix and not knowing Latin.
Tobias said,
December 3, 2007 @ 8:05 pm
Don’t worry, the original proposal for a US marketable name was indeed Helvetia, but the swiss designers declined, because they’d rather not call typeface like a country, so they went with the “typeface of Switzerland”, hence Helvetica. (That’s info from the doku.)