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by richthegeek 2291 days ago
Today I was trying to find info about Corpus Christi - a Polish film that won some awards lately. DDG gives me information about a place in Texas, including stuff from the local newspaper and attractions. I'm searching from a Poland IP btw. Anyway, the actual film was at the very end of the first page of results for me.

It certainly feels like it priotises things weirdly.

Google Maps has a similar issue though: plenty of US placenames are just stolen from European places and oftentimes I'll be trying to get directions to a nearby town and instead it'll navigate to someplace in Alabama instead. Strangely enough, not where I want to go...

4 comments

So does Google, "Corpus Christi" is too ambiguous.

"Corpus Christi polish film" is good enough. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corpus+Christi+polish+film&t=ffab&...

"Corpus Christi film" also works, results look relevant, but knowledge graph shows the old 2014 Venezuelan movie. This is where Google is way superior, it showed me average score on imdb and even local showtimes.

I imagine that if you were searching from a Polish IP, Google would infer that you meant the movie, not the city. For anyone in the United States, however, I'd expect the city to be the more common search.
Wait a second. You can't use a privacy themed search engine and expect them to lookup your ip, figure out what city you are in. The entire point of using ddg is to avoid this.
It already knows I’m in the UK from my IP address. I get a UK toggle at the top of the page.
DDG does use ip address to locate you.
Corpus Christi is the name of a major Christian festival and is a holiday in many countries with a large catholic population, including Poland. The city in Texas and the movie are named after it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Corpus_Christi

Did you include the word "film" in your search? Otherwise there's no reasonable expectation for it to show up. It's like searching for "Philadelphia" and expecting the movie to show up and not the city.
I understand what you're suggesting but for fun I did that search on DDG and the film was the 8th result (on the first page of results ;)
The experiment was a success