Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_fishfish | Hacker News Reader

I like DuckDuckGo, but it's much worse than Google at localisation. It's annoying to have to search, then repeat the search with "UK" on the end to make it realise I'm not interested in buying e.g. building supplies or coffee or beer from US-based businesses.

I get that it has no concept of who I am when I search, but some kind of localisation based on IP address could maybe help?

Also, it feels a little disingenuous to say Google is not a search company, it's an advertising company. DDG's revenue is also built on ads. Is it fair to say they are also not an advertising company, not a search company?

View on HN

I hate Google's localisation. My Accept-Language is set to English, I search for stuff in English, and Google throws piles of Dutch search results at me simply because I happen to be in Flanders. /ncr used to do the trick, but that's still showing me all sorts of Dutch stuff I'm not interested in.

Nowadays you have to add ?hl=en to the query string.

Thanks for pointing that out! Should be easy enough to automate using Greasemonkey :-)

There is a slider that allows you to put it on or off.

If your IP is in the UK, the slider will say "United Kingdom on/off" or something like that.

Right, but it's kinda annoying having to turn it on and off, as it remembers and I keep forgetting what I used last.

If I'm searching for programming stuff or similar, I want it off. If I'm searching for shops that sells bricks for my new wall, I want local results.

I've also noticed that even with it on, the "local" indexing is distinctly significantly worse than Google. That is, Google is much, much better at finding relevant pages which may contain variations on my search term when using my native language.

I guess that's just a question of resources, which is fair enough.

> If I'm searching for programming stuff or similar, I want it off. If I'm searching for shops that sells bricks for my new wall, I want local results.

In all fairness, how exactly do you expect DDG to know what you want from this, without doing some sketchy privacy invasive scanning of your search? If you really want a company to scan your every search and then tailor the results specifically, then by all means use Google, that's what they're good at!

> how exactly do you expect DDG to know what you want from this

The obvious heuristic is “does this search term frequently appear on local result sites?” For example, “brick suppliers” is a search term associated with websites that have a business address, whereas “python string length” mostly isn’t. The search engine already has to scan your search to know what to send you from the index; it doesn’t require anything more than that to be able to guess at the intent of specific searches.

I posit that whether a search should be "local" or "global" is much more a factor of what is being searched for than who is searching. If I search for a barber I want local results, and I expect that that would be true for most people. If I search for a weird error message I saw while using my computer I want global results, and again I expect that is true for most people.

If true, then DDG could apply the same heuristics about location-sensitivity for everyone's searches and improve the results for everyone, without any tracking of detailed individual preferences.

Well in my case, if I write Norwegian words, it's highly likely I want Norwegian results.

Also as mentioned, if I search for "thai restaurant" (which is written exactly the same in Norwegian as in English), the chances are very high I want a local thai restaurant in my city and not one on the other side of the planet.

Even if I enable location in DDG the search results includes a bunch of thai restaurants in Asia and the US. The map insert however is pretty spot on however, so all is not lost.

not sure what's the bang for UK, but for Germany it's !ddgde

Then you just type:

"!g something I am looking for via some super invasive method and random intimate knowledge about myself"

and press enter.

But I've found that I don't use Google that much. Maybe I type longer phrases in now? I wouldn't know, and DDG hopefully doesn't know either.

This is super unreliable for me when it comes to "shopping" type results. I'll often have to append "uk" to get it to actually return UK results, even then it can be hit and miss.

Isn't completely reliable for me in New Zealand - I do get slightly more NZ-related results with it turned on (it's pretty much useless with it off), but I still get quite a few results (some even with .co.uk and .ca TLDs in the results!) from all over the world.

It is one big strength of DDG, to give you the _freedom_ to do a local or global (often english language) search, just by flipping a switch.

i think localization is tricky for DDG for non-technical reasons. their value proposition is privacy, and computer privacy is poorly understood by most users. to many, "this thing knows where i live" would seem like a contradiction in purpose.

> it feels a little disingenuous to say Google is not a search company, it's an advertising company. DDG's revenue is also built on ads.

ddg runs ads on their site. google operates an advertising network, connecting advertisers with sites who are willing to run ads.

You can change the settings to default to region-specific search, perhaps that would solve your first issue?

https://duckduckgo.com/settings

Reply on news.ycombinator.com