[thaumasiotes]

> If I search for things like "car mechanic bristol", DDG comes up with lots of results from Bristol, Tennessee. It's not that DDG is worse than Google, it's just that DDG isn't tailoring the results to what it knows about me.

If I wanted a car mechanic in San Francisco, I would usually search for "car mechanic 94105" rather than "car mechanic san francisco". Regardless of search engine.

Do postal codes not work to refer to particular areas of the UK?

[notahacker]

The Bristol postcode is the letters 'BS' followed by a one or two digit number, so it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

UK postcodes are somewhat more useful when you want to narrow a search to a small area, especially for small towns and London districts where the number is a useful identifier and the area itself might have multiple or non-unique names

[thaumasiotes]

> it's not particularly good for finding a service provider in a large area.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this doesn't make much sense.

For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code. It restricts your results to car mechanics that are near the 94105 zip code, where "near" is a fuzzy term. I just ran this search myself, from outside San Francisco, and there's just a single result in the 94105 area. But there are plenty shown in 94107, 94103, 94102, 94111... (primarily 94107).

The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

[XelNika]

> For example, running a search for "car mechanic 94105" doesn't restrict your results to car mechanics that are located inside the 94105 zip code

I am seeing literally that issue with both Google and DuckDuckGo so maybe that depends on the region. My search results, both logged-in and in a private window, are limited to car mechanic websites that mention the zip code. The Google Maps search is not limited, but it's not very good in general, so I usually avoid it. DuckDuckGo finds practically no results in the map view (Apple Maps).

> The zip code is a cheap, easy, and unambiguous way to tell the search engine what you want. It's on the search engine to decide how to respond.

So is "car mechanic bristol uk". The parent's entire point is that DuckDuckGo doesn't consider context for natural language searches and claiming that everyone else is searching wrong is completely missing the point.

[Symbiote]

Lithuania, Slovakia and Indonesia also have 94105 as a valid post code.

Post codes are not particularly human friendly (though British ones like N1C 4AG are a bit better than just numbers; it's easy to see the N, N1, N1C prefixes in that).