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I have loved Google for a long time, for their corporate policies and overall attitude about things. I loved Gmail because it just works and it's amazing.

However. Just the other day, for the first time when using a Google product, I went :(

It's like this:

Here in Japan, when you enter "Google.com" into a browser, you are automatically redirected to Google.co.jp. There's a link at the bottom of the page that says "Google.com in English". Which is nice. Though really -- you're throwing stuff in the blank and pressing enter, anyway.

I usually use the Google search field in my Internet Explorer 7 (or Firefox, when I'm at home on the Mac), though yeah, this gives me results based on Google.co.jp. Which isn't a problem. Web search results are web search results.

Say I enter the name of a game, something that wouldn't produce search results outside of things about, uh, games.

Well, usually, it would return me the most relevent search results.

As of last Friday, though, it returns me the most relevent search results in Japanese.

That is to say, that it puts the Japanese search results at the top of the list. Say I enter "Splinter Cell", in quotes and everything: even though the Japanese name of "Splinter Cell" is spelled in katakana, Google will return search results for any and all Japanese online publications mentioning the game and, at the same time, also putting the English title in parentheses.

This is . . . really, really, really frustrating.

What's even more mind-boggling is that there's a little selector right beneath the search field. Click a box to choose how you want to search: "Search the entire web" or "Search articles in Japanese". This selector doesn't appear on the front page -- Google likes to keep it too clean -- so I have to actually search for something, enter the request, and then search again.

It sounds like I'm nitpicking, and I guess I am, though fuck. I had, for the longest time, respected and adored how efficient everything Google is. This seems like such an un-Google thing to happen. I mean, if a Japanese person is entering something in Google (Yahoo! is still the preferred search engine / free email / news service over here, for whatever reason), they're probably entering it in Japanese, and though there's a chance there could be Japanese text in a mostly-English article, it's not so likely that a series of keywords, or a complete sentence, would pop up in a block of English text.

I hope they fix this up soon :(

And while we're at it -- if I'm writing something in Japanese (because I do that sometimes (because I speak Japanese (perfectly (LOL))), and then I shift+tab over to my URL entry field to type a URL, it leaves the encoding in Japanese, when there, well, exist no URLs that represented in any alphabets other than English. Why can't they invent a browser that just cancels any encoding when the cursor enters the URL field? I mean, I find it popping up all the time. It's like, Microsoft Japanese IME is actually configured to cancel encoding back to English if you typed "www" and then a period together, or "http://". Not all URLs start with www, and not all people type all the way from from http://.

Ghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Yeah, anyway :(
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[108]

USA
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