[lucb1e]

DDG skews very heavily towards your country setting indeed, and the default is indeed the USA, but Google is even worse. On DDG the locale selector is a switch displayed on every search results page. For Google, you have to use a VPN for the same effect.

I'm a Dutchman living in Germany speaking English at home and at work, so I switch between languages quite a lot: Dutch when I want to know local things (e.g. European laws, or recipes with ingredients that stores here actually carry), German when I need to know something like filing taxes or when trash is being picked up (I don't speak German yet, so I only do this when necessary), and English for everything else. Trying to do that on Google is nearly impossible. It somewhat picks up on the language of your query (certainly better than DDG picks up on that), but for English queries I'll still get a few German results, even after I click the "Change to English?" prompt (and I have to click every time, since I do not store cookies for Google). Like, thanks for this German forum thread when looking for an error message after I already set it to English... In DDG you can just flip a switch.

[FabHK]

This. At least DDG gives you the option (prominently) to quickly and easily "nationalise" a query, if you want to, and doesn't try to impose its guess on you.

I've often found it annoyingly hard to get Google products back to a language I understand while traveling (no, the "append `&hl=en` to the URL" trick doesn't always work...)