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by reaperducer 2338 days ago
One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local"

It wouldn't be so terrible, except that Google is extraordinarily bad at geolocation.

Right now, Google thinks my work computer is in southern New Mexico. Google thinks my personal computer, right next to it, is in northern Nevada. Google thinks my mobile phone, in between the two, is in Los Angeles. All of those locations are hundreds of miles wrong.

But it gets even worse when you want to know about something in a place other than where you're standing right now. It's like nobody inside Google has ever done any trip planning in their entire lives.

Apple Maps has the opposite problem, though. If I want to search for a German restaurant near my location in the United States, it will show me places in Germany.

1 comments

How is Google supposed to know which location you want if you don't tell it and you don't want it to guess? It can't customize results just for you and serve bad results to the other 99% of users.
It could just not customize my results.

When I search for "peking duck recipe" show me a recipe for peking duck, and don't show me "local" restaurants which are 300 miles away.