If you want your home page to be google.com but it keeps redirecting to the country’s Google site then here’s a quick fix. Your homepage should be set to ‘www.google.com/ncr‘. The ‘ncr’ means No Country Redirect. That way, your default will always be Google.com, which is in English.
Early this year, Google Africa (based in Kenya) in collaboration with Lenstiti Kreol decided to come up with Google Seychelles in Creole (www.google.sc). Creole is the default language, and if you want to browse Google in English you will have to click the ‘English’ link at the bottom of the page.
As beautiful as the Creole language may be to many, English should be the default language of google.sc. Why? Because let’s face it…the only people in Seychelles who cannot read English are people who will not be sitting in front of a computer screen. The people who work in front of a computer most likely studied well at school and are more comfortable to use English as a means of communication on the internet. I mean, hello?
I’m reading phrases like “mon pe santi mwan sanse”, “resers avanse”, “zouti langaz”, “lalis tou bann sit ki ou’n vizite”, “seting”…wth?
When they initially put this in effect, I laughed at first because it was funny. They did it to commemorate International Mother-tongue Day. So I thought it was only going to be temporary. But no. Eventually, it became very annoying so I had to do the redirect. I learned about the redirect in China, because I didn’t want to be redirected to Google China or Google Hong Kong (when google.cn said goodbye). Although it’s different in China. There, MOST people prefer the site being in Chinese. Here in Seychelles, no study was even made. Google Africa probably ASSUMED that we’d prefer the site in Seychellois Creole.
They should have gathered a focus group of Creole-speaking Seychellois who surf the internet every single day, for more than 8 hours a day, and who have set Google as their homepage (assuming they perform more than 10 Google searches a day, and they use other Google tools). Then, of these people, they should ask them one single question: should Google.sc’s default language be English or Creole?
Here’s the funny part…displeased about this, I didn’t want to say anything negative on Facebook so I kept it to myself. THEN I started reading a lot of Creole-speaking people’s FB statuses saying how much they don’t like the new change.
I used to keep Google Seychelles as my homepage. I remember when I was working briefly in Shanghai my colleague was like “hey…you’ve got Seychelles under the Google logo…!”, that was really cool.
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WYSIWYG! I'm a simple person trying to live the simplest life possible - it seems to be the most difficult thing to achieve! I'm an internet enthusiast and I've been a webmaster since early 2007. I like: blogging, developing sites using open source software, social media, computer games, '80s music, comedy & horror, animals, crunching on M&Ms peanut and Smarties!
