Compartimentalizing the Web

It started with Google - at least it did here on my end of the wire. The smartalecs from Silicon Valley thought it would be nice to offer everyone a service in their own language. Not by simply offering it as an option, but by default: typing google.com in the address bar will land you on google.nl here in the Netherlands. If you want Google in English, you need to click a link.

This has some strange consequences. I am engaged in online discussions a lot and if I want to find news articles to back up my position, I need to go to the English Google first. Any ‘nieuws‘ search on Dutch Google with English words will turn up only blanks. Now if they are so smart, why can’t they just give me the obvious English language news that I am looking for? Why doesn’t Google search the whole web for words not found in the Dutch language part of the web? And now YouTube has followed suit - it detects my IP and sends me ‘promoted videos’ in Dutch, even though I have (falsely) indicated that I am from the US.

The web used to be the ultimate global village, the place to find different views on things, different takes on issues, different expressions of culture. But this compartimentalization ends all that, locking the average user in his own community.  Surely there are ways around that, but these are hurdles a lazy net user might not be willing to take. And so the global village is changing into a global group of villages, with fewer people willing to leave their comunity to go peek over someone else’s fence.

I am a translator. I depend on the web to present me with information with which I can check the accuracy of my work, the precise meaning of terminology, the background of an event which is described in ambivalous terms in the source text. I want ready access to the whole web - not some ’service’ which limits that. What’s more, I’ll be moving to Italy in the next months. I am learning Italian but I am not yet ready to use Italian search results. And I’d like to keep up with Dutch news. But Google will see the Italian IP and just assume that that’s what I want.

And that’s the bottom line. I know what I want - I don’t want someone else to think for me. And finally, as a parting shot in the direction of Linden Lab: don’t you ever assume that I want to start each Second Life session in Virtual Holland. Let me find the communities I am interested in myself.