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Comment by pedroaraujo | Hacker News Reader

DDG results are okay until you need to look up something non computer science related, like results for your local country.

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Actually that’s better too, I like how it’s possible to switch countries easily to get local results or choose global results.

Some non technical searches are more difficult though.

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.

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.

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.

No, it isn't. Non-localized search should ignore the geographical origin of the query, by definition.

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.

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.

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.

For me all results are worse, computer science or not.

DDG completely ignores my country or when it doesn't, the results are misclassified. And you can forget about local searches, DDG being worse than useless for those.

What strikes me as odd is that DDG is worse for computer science results too.

DDG often ignores search terms that Google doesn't. And which terms it ignores is a complete guess, so you do this back and forth putting relevant query words in quotes to try and force it.

I use DDG as my default search engine, but there's no point in denying the obvious. UI might be nice, but UI is unimportant.

That’s odd, because from my experience, it’s Google that’s constantly ignoring my search terms. With Google, I often had to quote “every” “single” “keyword” when it came to searching for computer science stuff. With DDG, not as much.

DDG returns mostly Norwegian results when I set the region to Denmark. I get that our languages are very closely related and thus hard to tell apart, but it does get annoying.

That is funny. The thing that annoy me most when writing in Norwegian on DDG is that most results are from Denmark, often including did you mean "Danish spelling for the same word"

Just add region:se (replace as appropriate) to your search.

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