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Comment by kringdom89 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that anyone who claims that Duckduckgo "Just works" only do english search. I usually do "english" / "mother tongue" searchs all day. Everytime, I need to remember to toggle the regional button otherwise I get attrocious results. Whereas google simply understand that if I'm searching using the english language it should prioritize english results while if I'm searching in another language it should prioritize it instead.

It gets tiring quickly and I find easier to append !g instead of clicking the regional toggle button.

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For me (German) it’s different. With DDG, I can easily choose to search for German content (by using !ddgde), with google I have to hope that they search for what I want. Sometimes google does, sometimes it does not. And if it doesn’t I’m out of luck unless I go into the settings and look for a way to tell it what to do.

Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.

> Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.

This is exactly why I like DDG way more than Google and why I love to use Alfred instead of Spotlight on my Mac. With DDG you have !bangs and with Alfred you also can tell him what you’re looking for. 99.9% of the time I know I’m looking for a file or a folder or a definition of a word or want to open an app or want to search the web etc. With Spotlight you’re stuck to the order Apple designed the results to show up

It's also very useful to have that control when you live in another country. I'm in Spain now, but most of the time I want to search in English or even French. Google only gives you local results.

Alternatively, you can go to the settings [0] and create a special URL: https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=de-de.

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

Thank you for the !ddgde bang - I face exactly the same problem as you.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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

On the contrary, I like the explicit language toggle because some search terms have better results with a specific language. I get annoyed when I enter a programming related search term and get non-English results.

I do a lot of searches in French, where a lot of the words are identical to English (English being heavily influenced by French), especially if one leaves out the accents.

I also search in Spanish (Castilian), but sometimes I want results from Latin America, sometimes from Spain.

Being able to set the language/region is of incredible help in both cases. There is no way to automatically detect this.

I also find that even with the regional toggle off, my results are still skewed towards my location or the native language of it. This is true for both DDG and Google. I want results completely agnostic of where my IP happens to be positioned.

And your account histories as well! It sucks(more than sucks) when Google only lets me what I want from someone else’s browser.

I actually prefer the toggle button for regional search. Also when I search in native tongue Google sometimes (like when using brand names, models of devices etc) gives me 2-4 pages of advertisement and stores links. It's hard to find a large companies homepage.

In DDG it's usually the first page.

I still do a lot of !g when I search technical stuff, as it lets +word -word and DDG doesnt find a lot of weird github issue pages, old forums, usenet posts sometimes.

DDG works well for Swedish. As for Finnish, DDG doesn't suck more than Google does.

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