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End User travel

Dear website, I know what I want – YOU don’t.

grrrrIt keeps happening. I go on a website to do a particular thing – e.g download Real Player onto a different computer or visit a website for a specific purpose – and the site makes assumptions and decisions for me which are completely erroneous.

Look, just because you have decided my IP is in xyz country it doesn’t mean I am suddenly fluent in that language, or want whatever local version of software you decide to dish up.

Google is a prime offender on this one. I type “Google.co.uk” whilst sitting in the US and what pops up? Google.com with all search results optimised for my current location, regardless of what I was actually seeking. Try getting round it and it takes several goes before you can ‘con’ the website into believing you may actually know what you want – it took ages to evict google.fr from my iThing.

I’ve had to set up VPN tunnels before now to spoof a UK IP address just to do a really simple search or get software.

I don’t mind being asked whether I want the mobile or desktop version because the site has detected I’m using a mobile device. But I object to being served up a site in a furrin language just because I happen to be sitting there right now. Luckily, I can handle French, Spanish and German, but gawd knows what will happen when I finally make it to Korea to check out their fibre. Or Mongolia.

Lindsey Annison

By Lindsey Annison

JFDI Internet marketer, author, Fibre To The Home and rural broadband campaigner, idea merchant

One reply on “Dear website, I know what I want – YOU don’t.”

I recently tried to send a friend in Canada a gift card from a well known brand – despite having links to “international sites” at the bottom, they kept doing a redirect back to .co.uk from .ca .

They never responded to my email ever. Ended up sending cash via good old fashioned snail mail. Should be included in the basic business skills 101 class they make web designers do……

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