| >Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". If I search "takeaway pizza [place of residence]" on a non-localised search engine, I get nothing. If I search "takeaway pizza [nearest large town]" I get a bunch of places that don't deliver to me. Google gives me what I want, which is a list of the dozen or so pizza places in the patchwork of villages and towns in the surrounding area. Google could give me that sort of result without any personalisation, but it would need to do another contentious thing - fuzzy matching. It needs to understand that when I search for [place of residence], I actually mean [place of residence plus everywhere within a certain radius], but only in some contexts. It needs to search the index not for the exact words in my search term, but for what it predicts will give me the most useful results. Again, this stuff is literally Google's job. I don't want to do the mental work of figuring out all the towns and villages within a five mile radius, I don't want to perform a bunch of different searches, I just want to see where I can get a decent pizza. Google shows me all the local places on a map, complete with reviews and opening hours. If I search on mobile, I can choose a place and call them or get directions with one tap. If I ask for directions, it'll warn me if there's traffic and offer me an alternative route. If you can't see how 2017 Google gives far better results for this query than 2007 Google, then I can only assume that you're being wilfully ignorant. |