In Switzerland; an odd technical tidbit
August 27th, 2006. Published under General. No Comments.
So I am in Geneva visiting my Brother-in-law and his family and I just noticed something. Google has been guessing my location based on my IP address for quite a while, pretty much everytime I use Google it defaults to Google Canada (when I am at home in Toronto), which is normally no big deal. This week though I am here in Geneva and when I go to Google it tries to guess where I am and correctly judges that I am in Switzerland and defaults to www.google.ch … and displays everything in German.
This caught be a bit by surprise and when I went looking for a button to change the language to English I couldn’t find one. I was using Firefox at the time and was getting the Google Firefox page, when bringing Google up in IE7 it does give a link to change the language which is good.
So this isnt really that important, but it was a minor little annoyance when I first saw it. If I lived here in Geneva (mostly French) and got the German page by default I might even be a bit put off, even though most of Switzerland speaks German primarily.
Phil
