I have remained undecided on the Google versus privacy debate until trying to research on story telling, I came to experience the new enforcements, stronger limitations that were shadows are now unbearable.
Because I live in NY and there’s no way of turn of my location, Google think that I only speak English. If I enter a query in Spanish, it gives me the translations assuming, of course, that my monolingual mind can not process another language. Dislike. Dislike. Dislike. Not to be a serial complainer, but they even made it harder to change the language settings, it’s all hidden and advanced searches are limited to. Before at least longer queries in Spanish hinted to Spanish results.
Google: personalized results in only one language are limiting, boring, ignorant, and not your democratic style. Give bilingual readers a chance to choose and flourish. We will be a majority some day and your translations definitely won’t do, or translations in general. I don’t need the basic recommendations of what the engine figures I need to learn in English. If I want English, I’d look in English, wouldn’t I? At least, start investing in multiple languages technology beyond literal translation. Spanish on the web needs a hand, the U.S. is the second country with the biggest Spanish-speaking population after Mexico, Spanish is pretty and uses more words for everything so it’ll keep you busy, people won’t take the time to manually adjust the settings and you’ll be loosing valuable eyeballs and page views.
On the bright side, it gives me a starting point for self-examination on my search habits. What do I look for in English, what do I look for in Spanish? Is there a why? A complementary or a random pattern? Because my brain is leaning towards English these days, I look for English anyways? Because I know that there’s more content in English online, my unconscious just automatically do it? A Bing search took me to Sobotong, allegedly a bilingual search engine and an article on bilingual babies, they learn in less than a year how to discriminate and understand both languages. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
Angela Lang 