[nessex]

I really wish Google would prioritize English results for English searches consistently. I'm living in Japan as a native English speaker, and have my OS, browser and logged in Google account all configured for English only. Despite that, Google search results always prioritize Japanese language content. Every now and then (though not consistently) it gives me a yellow popup asking if I'd like English results instead, which is a bit disappointing given they already have all the information they should need to make a judgement call about that. Maybe the individual experience here depends on the languages and regions involved.

[DoingIsLearning]

There was a time, a long time ago, where google had this:

www.google.com/ncr

'ncr' here stands for no country recognition. It allowed many expats to do technical searches without the noise of regionalization results.

Of course someone clever at google figured out that was probably too useful and now it just redirects you back to google.com because screw all those niche use-cases.

[r_sreeram]

That's not what it was. "ncr" was "No Country Redirect".

When you were in a different country (e.g., India), and you typed in google.com out of habit, it would recognize your IP-geo and redirect you to the country-specific domain (e.g., google.co.in).

If you really just wanted google.com for whatever reason, then you'd type google.com/ncr. It then wouldn't redirect you based on your IP-geo, and you'd stay on google.com.

In other words, google.com/ncr _always_ redirected you back to google.com. Then, and now.

[DoingIsLearning]

Thanks for correcting the acronym TIL.

However you can see from the comments in both android police [0] and reddit [1] that, irrespective of your assertiveness, the behaviour did indeed change at least in 2017 if not more times before.

It at the very least used to preserve the suffix and absolutely respect no regional results. It's the same as the old bolean operators, google claims the behaviour is unchanged but will silently ignore them.

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/27/changing-googles-do...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/4xda1p/googlecomncr...

[hysan]

Was going to post the exact same thing. This was my experience while living in Japan too. To me, the takeaway is that you simply cannot catch everyone with your defaults. Google and DDG have made different prioritization defaults and the result of that is what we see in anecdotes in this thread.

[benhurmarcel]

You don't need to catch everyone with your defaults. You just need to make it possible to not use the default.

Sure, give me local results if I don't specify anything. But let me tell you if I want results in English now.

[fsflover]

> To me, the takeaway is that you simply cannot catch everyone with your defaults.

You don't have to. DuckDuckGo allows [0] to create a link with settings: https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=jp-jp.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/settings