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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage.

As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.

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> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me

And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.

The first one is the one that put the most coins into the AdWords slot, I'd guess.

I live in the UK. I recently searched for “pizza” and the top result was in Thailand.

This behavior works exactly the way you would expect in Apple Maps. A search for a bakery returns relevant nearby results.

The fact that Google doesn’t see the blatantly obvious problem, or that they try to argue that the users are wrong is a textbook case of why Apple has been doing OK in the market downturn while Google’s business continues to crash. Apple prioritizes their core products and human interface design, Google prioritizes short-term (advertising) revenue, while neglecting their core products in favor of the latest shiny thing.

Somehow DuckDuckGo has taken this to absurd extremes. Almost any search that doesn’t get many natural hits shows branches of my local government toward the bottom of the first page of results.

I have seen this too, also on bing. Not just government though, sometimes it manages to find a local house for sale instead.

You do realize that duckduckgo is primarily a frontend for bing right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Search_results

What we see is likely the attempt to squeeze even more juice from advertising over which Google virtually have a monopoly. Google is trying to continue its exponential growth while relying on selling advertisements. The market had already been saturated and optimised to crazy levels. Smart thing would be to expand to other sources of revenue, but other projects inside Google fail. As they are failing to compete internally for resources against that crazily optimised source of revenue.

It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.

> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me

Only when you're using a phone? Only if you're not at home? What if you want to find out what a bakery is?

(Apologies for rapid fire, I'm not having a go at you, just curious)

There isn't a necessity for an "or"

One could show a map preview of local results, which can be expanded as well as generic search results below/aside/...

Or a header along the lines of

We're showing you local results. To search the internet for "bakery" click here

It'd be great if they did that for anything personalized as well while they're at it

> Only when you're using a phone?

No, eg when I'm at the office, and we talk about where to go eat and I type restaurant, or I need a new stapler and I type office supply, etc ...

> Only if you're not at home?

Not really, eg "movie theater" or "flower shop" come to mind for things I would request while at home

> What if you want to find out what a bakery is?

I would type what is a bakery or define bakery ?

I'm a long time tech user, I miss the days of keyword centric search as I felt I could more easily communicate to the search engine what I wanted, but let's be honest those days have passed, most people type sentence and thus the engine interpret sentences

This is achievable with geolocation based on IP address, which is how it works on, e.g. a desktop web browser.

Less than half the population has decent geolocation by IP. Most people the IP address will only identify the country or even nothing at all.

Not much use if you want to search bakery's.

Google is my ISP. My geolocated IP is accurate within a 15 mile radius. It doesn't matter if I have location services turned off or I'm using my desktop, searching "bakeries near me" finds them without issue.

I suspect that isn't all just one big coincidence.

Google has what 3 or 4 cities where they operate as an ISP, each with a pretty small footprint. It's no surprise anyone knows where you are.

A cable or telephone company has generalized coverage measured in states; some of them organize their network and customer IPs by small geographies, but sometimes all of southern california is in a single pool of IPs.

Coming from the CDN land this isnt true. We didnt put too much effort in to precision, but on the order of 99% of IP addresses get down to metro area. Cheap commerical providers like Maxmind get to the right postcode on the order of 90-95% of the time. Building your own latency and peering maps bridges that gap to 99% or better. Simply based on network topology and latency we should be able to get you down to post code or general area of a city.

Not in my country - unless your ISP is in the business of selling customer PII to advertisers (coughvirgincough) your IP geolocation will often be a completely different city.

Of course, personally if I wanted to search for nearby bakeries on my phone I'd have just opened the google maps app....

funny how that works. I never ever allow location access to anything Google or any website for that matter, and have a muscle memory to hit deny when the browser prompts me. The other day I was searching something and then clicking my bookmarked Google News and suddenly all news were UK specific, and my search results fro "heatpumps" were are UK companies and products.. I was confused until I noticed that my work VPN chose a UK endpoint because the NL one where I am had higher latencies. So, Google heavily tailors the results based on where it thinks you're at. Also, I was delighted to know that inspire all the tracking Google probably does on me, it was easily fooled to think I was in the UK :-)

"Achievable" is quite charitable from my experience. With the previous ISP I would get located in a city some 2000kms away, sometimes the scam ads would detect my location as null.

Maybe it's more effective in places like the US.

No, I’m randomly placed 2 states away. A solid day of driving.

IP-based location is mostly usable for country. I've rarely found it gets the city right, often it doesn't even get the county right.

It gets really annoying when you are trying to search for some specific term in English and google keep guessing that you wanted something that sounds similar in your native tongue.

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