April 2015 – Musings on Languages, IT and other stuff

In search, Google’s localisation seems to be poor

Google are able to identify my location via useful clues like the GPS on my phone, and, I suppose, a reverse look up of the IP from which I connect to the internet sometimes. On my computer, Google knows exactly where I am, down to demonstrating my location when I open Google Maps, for example. There are additional clues: I’ve told it, in the past, that I am based in Ireland, and, mostly, when I run search, it is via Google.ie.

But it has become increasingly useless as far as finding outlets for online shopping. Today, I am looking for top spiral bound A4 notebooks – we’ll skip why exactly that is the case because it doesn’t matter. Google returns to me, as top search results, companies uniquely in America. This problem is not unique to top spiral bound A4 notebooks – I have had similar frustrating experiences with art supplies. There could be a thousand stationery shops in the UK, Ireland, and most of Europe, and Google still seems to think that someone based in Ireland is going to order off companies in the United States of America.

I appreciate some of this is based on search engine optimisation carried out by the companies concerned, but given that Google’s sponsored links are generally regionally appropriate, or at least more so than the first 2 or 3 of its search results, it would help if the organic search results were also regionally appropriate.

There is a wider issue with Google in my experience, however; while it provides services in a large number of languages, and provides online translation facilities, it seems to mainly operate on the assumption that most of its users are monolingual. I generally have an issue with Google News on that front, and have basically set up a feed from Twitter to pull news from a number of different source languages. For all the media organisations which Google News serves, it doesn’t seem to cope well with the idea that people might be more than monolingual.

Bookmarks in Chrome

Google rolled out updated bookmarking to the main version of Chrome lately. It arrived on my desktop a couple of days ago.

I do not usually spend much of my time checking out Chrome betas so I was unaware that this functionality – I use the word reservedly – had been a part of Chrome betas for the last year. I could be obnoxious and say I don’t need it and I didn’t want it. But more to the point, I haven’t worked out what utility it adds for me at all.

I first discovered Google’s Chrome team had done something with book marking when someone on Facebook complained that it now took them 4 clicks to book mark stuff. This was a warning.

I use bookmarks quite a bit. They are also reasonably well organised and I have an overview of how they are organised. All I really want from them is a list of websites and whatever their browser address button icon is. Oh, and I want as much of an overview of them as possible.

This is not possible with what Google have done. They’ve replaced list of bookmarks with tiled icons of images pulled from the site. This is a chronic waste of space and vastly reduces the amount of useful information you get on a single page. This is the default.

For anyone who has bookmarks sorted in folders, the folder list display now has a significant amount of white space between the folder names, effectively halving the number of folders that you can have an overview of any one time.

In addition, they have gotten rid of the folder tree option, which, if you’ve actually organised your bookmarks into folders and subfolders, means there’s a lot of information you cannot access any more. Subfolders appear as tiles on the righthand side of the dividing bar instead.

Google have provided a list view. However, this still doesn’t give you the tree overview, and more to the point if you are clicking on subfolders, the change of display from one subfolder to its contents and vice versa is animated. It is enormously distracting and I hate it.

The interface for bookmarking items via the star icon in the browser bar has been changed and now includes a large image which is not exactly necessary, clutters the interface and wastes space.

There is a method under the hood where you can configure Chrome not to use this clinically insane change – it’s not a user enhancement – and I will apply it. But I cannot count on Google to leave that backdoor option in place.

It’s one thing to provide what they think is enhanced utility (and it is entirely likely that for some people, the tiles display is useful – it just isn’t for me as I prefer a tree list and set of icons instead and they don’t need to be animated.

Other complaints include the fact that you can no longer sort bookmarks alphabetically. Google expects you to search these things, you see.

Google have a product page where this is being discussed. Feedback is universally negative. They have said they want feedback through the gears icon in Bookmark Manager where apparently 25% of the feedback is positive. That’s still a lot of negative feedback.

Ultimately, Chrome is Google’s product, and they provided it for free so yes, if they want to make changes that annoy the wider user community, they can. It is also unclear whether enough of the wider community is impacted by this. The extent to which people use bookmarks varies, and the underlying methods by which people use them varies. Google is happy enough to annoy a few million people when it suits them (Google Reader is a key example of that). Presumably, they are going somewhere with this that is not completely clear to Chrome users at the moment. I’d have to hope they are because otherwise, they’ve foisted a change for changes sake, reduced and wrecked usability, all for the sake of shiny and new.

The thing is, it’s possible that in fact, the sake of shiny and new is what drove this. The technology sector has forgotten that it’s basically a support industry and thinks it’s now a disruptive industry.

Large wave events in Ireland

A couple of years ago, Professor Frederic Dias and some of his colleagues published a list of large scale wave events around the coasts of Ireland, linked with various causes, and from the historical record. It’s an interesting paper, and if you have any interest at all on sea behaviour around Ireland, it’s worth a look to get a picture of some of the weather/wave related impacts on the country historically. This is linked to the Multiwave project, page here.

They could do with a little help if you’ve experienced any extreme wave events. They’d be grateful if you could fill out the form linked on this page (pdf) or this one (word) and send it back to them.

Language learning

I found myself taking part in a discussion on language learning this morning and thought it might be worth a while to drop in some things that are on my bloglater list. I will develop them in more depth later maybe but this is just an overview of them.

on average, twice as many girls study languages at school leaving stage in both the Irish leaving certificate system and at A-level stage in England/Wales
in absolute numbers, more students study higher level French in Ireland than study A-level French. A-level students have a higher average grade than HL Leaving certificate students and almost 30% get an A or higher at A-level, versus around 13% in Ireland.
After French, the second most popular A-level foreign language is Spanish where the number of candidates is higher than for HL LC candidates.
Spanish is the only language where there are more A-level candidates than HL LC candidates.
The second most popular language for HL LC is German.
HL LC statistics give figures for Italian; the A-Level stats didn’t, but interestingly, did give figures for Irish. If they were higher than Italian, then the figures for Italian are extremely low at A-Level stage.
Amazon has opened up its Kindle store to include significantly more foreign language literature than was previously the case.
The internet makes access to foreign language media significantly easier than was previously the case
Facebook allows you to customise your newsfeed sources to include foreign language media options more easily than Google does. Google News, however customisable it is, is still a fiasco in that respect. It is distinctly monolingual – so while I can easily pull in foreign sources, those foreign sources are still English language.

With respect to the A-Level HL LC comparison, there are serious difficulties in doing a qualitative comparison given feature differences between the two exam systems, viz, in terms of mandatory subjects and de-facto mandatory subjects. The Leaving cert is a marginally less specialist set up and it is worth noting that the comparison figures above are specifically higher level figures and do not include the high number of students taking ordinary level studies. Students at LC level take 6 to 7 subjects whereas A-level tops out at 4 usually. Irish, English and mathematics are defacto mandatory in Ireland – nearly every single students takes all three – and most university requirements include a minimum of some sort of a pass in a foreign language module. Hence, the motivations are different. This may be reflected in the average grades which, for A-level, are across the board, higher.

Data sources:

HL Leaving certificate: www.examinations.ie
A-level: www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/14/a-level-results-2014-the-full-breakdown