Google Preferences - Interface Language: change my search results dramatically!

[mdf]

Hello

I'm not sure I'm in the right section but I'll try this question here. I experienced a VERY weird behavior from google today.

I'm living in Quebec, and my regional language as well as browser language is French. So naturally, when I log on my google account, I have a french version of Google. Remember, this is only my language preference to "Display Google tips and messages" (this is how the field is called in the preferences of Google). I never asked to limit results to french language pages or pages from my region of the world, and I'm not using a regional search engine explicitly, I'm always on google.com (not google.ca or google.fr or whatever portal).

So I'll give you a concrete example. Having my Display tips and messages set to French, when I search for "Beaujolais Wines", my website (global wine & spirits) come out 10th in Google SERP.

Now, when I switch my Display tips and messages to english, my website come out 480 something (I had to switch to 100 results per page to find it). This is a HUGE difference for changing a preference about the displaying of tips and messages. The page that Google serves me in the results is always the english version of it. But we do have a french version. Anyway, I don't see why that would do any difference since I'm just playing with the interface language preference.

Can anyone explain this to me? This is getting us very concerned because we are doing a lot of business around the world!

[Carlos Chacón]

Hello

I'm not sure I'm in the right section but I'll try this question here. I experienced a VERY weird behavior from google today.....


Can anyone explain this to me? This is getting us very concerned because we are doing a lot of business around the world!
Hi,
My circumstances are similar but on different languages (Spanish & English).
About your situation, I have 2 questions:

-What’s the main entrance page language? (Index or home page)
-Where’s the hosting located?

Do not forget that sometimes the competition is very different on the same keyword phrase depending on .ca, .com or others. So, check out the competition searching for the same keywords.

[mdf]

Hello Carlos

Our main entrance page is in english. However, we do have a version of it in french, which is one click away from the main english page.

We're hosted in Montreal, Canada (same location from where I'm doing my testings). I don't know if Google gives more credibility to french or english websites for this region of the world because in the city of Montreal, half of the people are french and the other half are speaking english and other languages!

Remember that my website is a .com. We don't have a .ca or .fr. And we're always talking about Google interface language display preference.. Why would that change a search result?

Etienne

[ShandyKing]

Perhaps the functions which affect Googles Adsense and Adwords function the same as their Search Results.

Google

“The Preferences link on the Google home page lets users choose the language in which they want to search. When the user sets the language preference, Google will only display ads that are targeted to the chosen language. For example, users who choose Spanish as their language preference will see ads targeted to Spanish speakers.
Google does not translate ads. If an advertiser writes an ad in English and targets the Spanish language, the ad will appear in English, regardless of the targeted language."

“we can use an advertiser's language and location targeting settings to reach users in many different areas around the world. Learn how Google determines the location and/or language of a user by Internet Protocol (IP) address, Internet domain, query parsing, and language preference detection.”

“Google can identify a user's IP address, which is the unique number assigned to each computer connected to the Internet such as 10.32.20.135, to pinpoint a user's general physical location. The IP address is always a series of four numbers separated by three decimal points. Ads on Google and other sites in the Google Network are shown in a language according to a user's IP address. For example, if a user is searching on Google.com and his/her IP address is registered in France, the user will see ads targeted to France and/or French speakers.”

“Google has over 100 country-specific domain extensions to which AdWords ads can be targeted. The Internet domain is the suffix attached to each web address, such as .com, .fr, and .es. Google.com is geared to English speakers, Google.fr to French speakers, and Google.es to Spanish speakers.”
“If a user searches on any of the hundreds of Google domains, ads will be displayed according to the domain extension used. For example, if a user located in Spain searches on Google.fr, the user will see ads targeted to France and/or French speakers.”

“With query parsing, Google can use the user's search query to determine when to show ads targeted to a specific city, regardless of the user's IP address. For example, if a user with an IP address in New York searches for 'hotels in Hollywood,' the user will see ads targeted to users in Hollywood.
This feature is only available in the United States.”

[mdf]

I don't think that this explains it.. We already know that when we speak to clients in France, they get different results than us, which is kinda normal and is well explained by the information you found.

I did that test from the same location (ie IP address), in the same city (montreal Canada) on the same domain (google.com). The only difference was my language preference.

Both results served me the english version of my page (when I search using the french preference, all the results on the first page are in english, and the only add displayed is in english also, but it might be targetted to a french audience).

I also noticed that when I search in english, I rank 480 something out of aroud 500,000 results, and when I search using the french interface language, I rank 8th out of 1,300,000 or so results. The number of results found greatly differ, and I don't understand why.

[Olney]

I believe that search results are geotargetted
I noticed that when I came back to Tokyo.
Being number 1 in Google doesn't mean being number 1 worldwide.

I belive also there might be different results in certain large markets... (just a theory)

[mdf]

I agree with you, the results in Google are geo-targetted. We've noticed that for quite a while, as I explained in my last post.

But it doesn't change the fact that I did that test from the same geo-location.

So it would mean that the results are "interface language" targetted, eventhough I got results in english both times (since my search query was in english).

[ceeemuu]

Hi guys,

Thanks for posting this thread mdf. It's very interesting.

I thought that I would do a little test myself, and found some peculiar results.

Searching: google.co.uk for a term in English, from an IP in the UK

Display Google tips and messages: in German

Browser & regional language: en_GB

The #1 result (and numerous other results, though not all) were in German, and matched the translation of the English term that I searched for. How this provides the user with a good match, I am not sure, as my search results were not limited in anyway via preferences, and I searched the Web.

Interestingly enough, the Google URL contained search?hl=de, rather than the usual search?hl=en.

If anyone can explain why the above happens, I would be most interested to hear.

[added] Even when I remove the search?hl=de from the URL, leaving search?q=, the results still match the language of the preferences for tips & messages.

rgds

C

[Kal]

Google's geo-targeting certainly has an impact on regional searches. As does searcher IP address location, site IP location, user preferences and search query language. Varying these is going to produce vastly different results as Google becomes more sophisticated and skilled at predicting searcher intentions.

[mdf]

If Google really uses the interface language to adjust search results, am I the only one who sees that as something potentially problematic?

Remember that by default, you see Google home page in the language specified by your windows regional setting. It is not because my windows is configured with french regional settings that I would want to see results differently than if I had picked english regional settings.

And I can't explain why my web page written in english would be 9th when I view results in french and 499th when I view results in english. This gap is just too big for a rational explanation!

[ceeemuu]

mdf

Perhaps it is to try to overcome the problem of users in a shared environment, such as a library or cyber-cafe? If the environment is set with regional and browser languages that are different from the user's preferred language, then allowing the interface language to adjust results may assist the user.

However, I am intrigued as to why when I performed a search after changing the IL to German, Google revealed the #1 SERP matching the German translation of the query that I had entered. Why would I type in English if I really wanted German pages (if not testing) ?

[mdf]

ceeemuu

Your point might be valid. But I wouldn't understand why Google would adjust its search algorithm for a minority of its users (I don't think the majority of Google users are searching from cafee or librairies!).

With that said, the behavior you get in German sounds odd to me also.. Are you implying that Google translated your search query and returned you pages in German for an english query?

[ceeemuu]

Your point might be valid. But I wouldn't understand why Google would adjust its search algorithm for a minority of its users (I don't think the majority of Google users are searching from cafee or librairies!).

Agreed, they may be in the minority. Just a suggestion that may go towards explaining the IL-effects that occur despite IP and regional / browser languages.

With that said, the behavior you get in German sounds odd to me also.. Are you implying that Google translated your search query and returned you pages in German for an english query?

When I ran the test, I entered an English search term and the page that appeared at #1 was a German site that matched the German translation of the term that I had entered. However, it may have been due to the term that I used. I have just tried some similar searches, and whilst there are foreign sites entering high in the rankings for some of the queries, others are producing English sites. I took a closer inspection on the one particular query that I had used previously in light of this. It appears that the key-phrase appeared somewhere on the page in English, but the title, description and page content were all in German.

The IL certainly appears to add extra weight to domains that are in the language set for the interface, despite the query being carried out in English, at least when the query being carried out is not region-specific.

An example of how the results change:

Query = university
Site = www.google.co.uk
Browser & regional = English (UK)
IP = from the UK
Google IL = French

1. Université d'Ottawa - University of Ottawa - [ Traduire cette page ]
Located in the heart of Canada's Capital for more than 150 years, a university of offering a comprehensive range of first-rate undergraduate, graduate and

2. Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Sciences économiques, humaines, juridiques et politiques.

3. Université Laval - Accueil - [ Traduire cette page ]
Official site with information about admissions, courses, faculty, research and administrative services.



OK, so there is some occurrence of the English spelling in the top 3, but #2 is a puzzler. Zero occurrence of the query term in English. The pages that I have scanned on the site are also all in French. I couldn't spot an English spelling of the query term anywhere, but I could have missed something.

The remaining top 10 SERPS (4-10) were:

www.univ-rennes1.fr
portail.unice.fr/jahia/
www.umontreal.ca/
www.univ-lyon1.fr/
www.harvard.edu/
www.unige.ch/
www.ucl.ac.be/

Any thoughts?

[mdf]

Very interesting test ceeemuu.

For your result #2, I think the simplest explanation is the best: there are probably several hundred websites written in english that will have text URLs with the word "university" pointing to La Sorbonne. This is a very famous university.

I didn't get the exact same results as you in the first 10 results, but that might be related to the fact that you did this 1 month ago! One thing seems obvious, and it's that the IL language carries great weight in the search result. Keeping the IL to english only gave me american universities here (with the exception of Cambridge on the first page, and Oxford on the 2nd page). Switching it to french gave me some from Quebec, and some from France. Then restricting results to english pages only again change the results dramatically but that was expected.

Now what I wonder is: how do people configure their version of Windows in each country? Do they adjust the language and regional setting to match their native language? Do user change the basic configuration of Google when they search on the internet if their language is different from english? Are they changing it to english if it's not defaulted to english?

[Kate]

Hi,
I've done some testing in Belgium on the different language versions of the google.be interface. The results in each case are not the same, but I see some pattern from looking at those results that may explain what you're seeing.

In general, the .be google domain seems to favor other 'Belgian' sites (sites either hosted in Belgium or with a .be domain). Those sites rank higher in all language versions of google.be than they do in google.com.

When searching on a french term in the Dutch or German interfaces, sites that have Dutch or German versions (although html encoding isn't explicitly those languages on the homepage) seem to be favored. This seems to be what's happening to your site as well, where you appear higher when your language preferences are set to French when searching on an English term than when your language preferences are set to English. Your site has a French version, so maybe you are getting some benefit from that.

If you want to know what language people visiting your site have their preferences set to, I think this is something you can pick up and store in your database using a javascript detector. It's like browser version I believe: something available to you if you request the information form the user's computer. I could be wrong about that. I would assume that most people do not go around changing their language settings, so it would be whatever is their default when the OS is installed.