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by Doctor_Fegg 2240 days ago
DDG’s definition of “global” is essentially “American” though. Presenting results exclusively for Worcester, MA, when I search for “Worcester” from a UK IP address (near Worcester, Worcestershire) isn’t being global, it’s being dumb.

It comes up every time DDG is discussed on HN and I don’t understand why they don’t fix it. It’s the main thing that keeps me using Bing on my phone.
2 comments
kick 2240 days ago
Worcester has a higher population than England's Worcester, and as such probably has more backlinks to pages related to it. That is global. Expecting global results to be regionalized is silly; just use regionalized results.
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Doctor_Fegg 2240 days ago
That's a very engineer-focused way of looking at it.

I don't care about backlinks or population or whatever weighting DDG uses: I want relevant results. DDG is a user-facing search engine, not a tech demo. Showing a UK visitor three pages of results about Worcester, MA is simply bad UX.

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kick 2239 days ago
Then use regional results! I, personally, am not an engineer. I'm a person who has an actual use for 'global' results, and my main reason for using DuckDuckGo is the ability to not have regional results.

If you want relevant results, don't use the global weighting. Use the UK weighting. That's why it's there. Literally so people with your preference of localized results can have localized results.

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andrewshadura 2239 days ago
I set the region to Slovakia: it shows me a map of the UK Worcester and mixed results mostly about the US one:

https://i.imgur.com/i6fb6sz.png

Now I set the region to the UK, I would expect the more relevant results. It shows the map for the US Worcester and mixed results again, but differently mixed:

https://i.imgur.com/OdhCQg9.png

This doesn’t make much sense to me.

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enriquto 2240 days ago
No, it isn't. Non-localized search should ignore the geographical origin of the query, by definition.
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gcthomas 2239 days ago
When I do it from the UK, with localisation on I get a whole page of links on the UK Worcester, with it off the hits are mostly the US one, but the Wikipedia page like is still UK.

YMMV, of course, but this search works fine for me.

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