[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