[falsenapkin]

Not disagreeing with your main point but some anecdata on local searches: for me, Google likes to show me the other, larger city by the same name several hundred miles away. If I use Google Maps it likes to teleport as well. Sometimes even serving results for unrelated businesses, like one time I was searching for a photo developer and it recommended a B rate fast food chain.

Kagi has done a much better job of respecting where I live, though it has had a few minor misses that Google produced (maybe after wading through some crap).

[mmahemoff]

By “local”, I’m mainly concerned with the country rather than city level. I’m not US based and most search engines have that bias.

For example, searches about news, public holidays, or certain statistics should default to the user’s home country (however that is determined, which is admittedly a whole other can of worms that even Google doesn’t always handle well).

[falsenapkin]

Ah! Miss on local, apologies