Google has long been localising its various websites and services, which I find incredibly annoying: if I want to read Dutch news I’ll ask for and I don’t want my search results tailored to where I am. Now as you know, Google bought Blogger a while back and has now localised blogspot as well and now every time I want to Alicublog, I’m directed to http://alicublog.blogspot.nl/ rather than http://alicublog.blogspot.com/. Suspicious minds have said that Google has introduced this to be able to selectively close down access to controversial/”illegal” blogs while keeping this censorship invisible outside the target country. For the moment it certainly doesn’t possible, other than using a VPN connection to the US or by masking my IP address in some other way, to get round this autoswitching.
And that has fucked up the commenting systems of quite a few blogs I follow, as the Echo system they depend on is not smart enough to understand foo.blogspot.com is the same as foo.blogspot.nl. So I can’t read the comments at Alicublog, I can post comments at the *.nl version, but nobody will every read them…
Fuckers.
Barry Freed
June 17, 2012 at 7:59 pmThe censorship angle is interesting but I wonder if the phenomenon you’ve encountered is part of the strategy discussed in this story: http://search.slashdot.org/story/12/06/17/2258210/how-steve-jobs-changed-google-plus
One thing I have noticed is how crap google search has been getting. Especially the way automatically changes my search queries to the way it thinks they should be spelled. This goes beyond a simple suggestion with a link saying “did you mean x?” to actually changing the text inside the search window. It’s becoming increasingly frustrating. I gave duck duck go a go a while back but it’s not really fast enough (and now I see why google very early on emphasized speed in serving up results) but it’s only a matter of time.
Martin Wisse
June 18, 2012 at 3:17 amYeah, you can switch those defaults off, but it’s still a pita.
Regarding speed over accuracy, this is interesting as well, about Gmail.
guthrie
June 18, 2012 at 10:50 amI noticed this a couple of months ago. Was thinking of writing a letter to google complaining about it, and getting it delivered by a friend who lives near them in SF.
There’s several blogs I can’t read the comments because of it, and I know of at least one who moved to his own address rather than use blogger anymore.