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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Can someone tell me why Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local results? I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses containing maybe one word in common.

It's most frustrating with phone numbers. I picked up the habit of searching the random numbers that called me, to try and find out if they were possibly important. I used to get a bunch of spam sites that clearly existed to profit off me making those searches.

Both Google and DDG have removed those spam sites, even though they were useful at times. Google will tell me the number is in some random PDF that contains a few of the digits, then no other results. DDG will say the top result is my local police department, something that freaked me out the first few times.

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Man, thank you for saying this. Stuffing results with geolocated local junk despite explicitly opting out by choosing “All regions” is so frustrating. This wasn’t happening a year or two ago. I submit negative feedback about it constantly, but I guess not enough people are doing that for anyone to notice or care.

I’ve also noticed a significant increase in attempts to stuff news into regular search results. I really do not appreciate being force-fed mental health poison. I don’t need it ever, but I especially don’t need it when I’m searching for some specific technical thing and then get emotionally sabotaged by some clickbait headline because … why? Some bullshit KPI? Why are tech companies so obsessed with pushing news into every orifice?

Hah, calling the news "mental health poison" is the most accurate thing I've read all day.

Yeah, I've noticed this as well with DDG recently: even with the localised checkbox disabled it still prioritises them, which often is very frustrating as the results are then almost totally useless.

However, more generally, I've personally found that DDG (and maybe Bing's then?) localised results are just really bad, and have been for the multiple years I've been using DDG and it's had this feature: I'm in New Zealand, and enabling localised / region-based search still often provides results to pages with TLDs like "co.uk", ".ca" and ".pl" (these latter are really common for content-generated spam in my experience), which I just can't understand...

Unfortunately, I have found that Google's results are usually a lot better in terms of being "location-aware" than DDG, at least when that's what you want...

I habe the same experience from Germany. There's the slider but it's not doing mich.

That's a bit surprising that you're seeing spam sites with .ca, those are illegal here and all .ca domains must be registered by someone in Canada.

You can report them: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canada-anti-spam-legislatio...

DDG is just repackaged Bing. Always has been. I remember looking into them when I was ready to job-hop many years ago, and they asked for dedication to their search engine as their foremost requirement for employment. It's the "drop-shipping" equivalent of search engines.

hope kagi takes ddg place in terms of adoption. never really liked ddg even though i always care about privacy.

I really don't get that sentiment. Currently Kagi is just as dependent on Google as DuckDuckGo is on Bing. That might only be temporary of course and Kagi does seem to be working on a search engine of their own.

Rather than wanting Kagi to take the place of DuckDuckGo, it would would be better if Kagi could take users from Google, and then when ready, drop Google as a search provider.

Kagi mixes google, bing, some non-profit small-web SE, and their own index.

I don't think they use Bing, but yes, Google, Marginalia, Yandex, Brave and others. I still fail to see how that's different to DuckDuckGo, who also run their own crawler. It's really weird that people are almost hating on DuckDuckGo for how they run their search engine, while applauding Kagi, for doing the same, but with a different business model.

I also assume that Kagi uses some shady residential IPs proxies and similar tricks to scrap Google while DDG has access to the Bing API.

You can buy access to the Google Search API, which is what I assume Kagi does. Building your product on being able to circumvent some Google restrictions seems like a bad business move, if you can buy the same service for a reasonable price.

Where can I buy it?

https://developers.google.com/custom-search

It's been available for ages. We used it to power the company internal search for a large enterprise I worked at 17 or 18 years ago.

Yes this isn’t an API to make a generic search engine.

Only if they changed that (which they might have as part of their cost-optimization). They said they mixed bing and google results back then.

Kagi should hire the Marginalia author.

We already include Marginalia results in Kagi [1]

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

DDG used to be the HN darling and you would get downvoted for saying anything negative or even insinuating that they are relying on Bing. Now the spot has been overtaken by Kagi but it looks like it suffers from the same problems. The counterargument that they have their own index as well is the same that was used for DDG, when the reality was that it was only used for widgets and other fluff. Let's see how it plays out for Kagi.

> Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local results

From what I can tell this is an issue with the Bing API that DDG uses that the DDG folks have been unable to resolve. I've tried many identical queries between DDG and Bing and while Bing does occasionally return incorrect local results, the completely irrelevant local results that appear on almost every DDG search do not seem to happen with Bing itself.

From what I understand, DDG is aware of the issue. I don't know why it isn't more of a priority.

Long time DDG user (>10 years) here, and it’s astounding to me that they haven’t prioritized making their own independent index to switch off Bing. I would have expected them to do it like 5 years ago, but there’s afaik no initiative to do so. It’s unfortunate and am now trying other engines like Brave search.

I also occasionally try Brave search when a DDG search fails. Sometimes Brave finds what I want, but I frequently get Captcha (and now proof of work) challenges that are quite annoying. I don't get this with any other search provider (though StartPage would frequently do this a while back). I hope this is just a phase, because I would likely use Brave Search more if not for this issue.

Hi, Brave engineer here,

Are you by any chance using a VPN while using Brave Search? (ProtonVPN?)

Thanks for your help, we're working on ways to reduce the number of captchas shown to VPN users and your feedback is very useful.

Sorry, just saw your response. I indeed use ProtonVPN.

Thanks for confirming, we've just deployed some improvements to better handle VPN traffic and penalize legit users less. I hope this improves your QoL on Brave Search.

> I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses

Query: “I’m coming out of my cage…”

Result (Ad): “You’ll be doing just fine with these amazing year-end closeout prices at Al’s Discount Car Barn. Gotta come down—you’ll want it all!”

Ads would make sense, but there's no way my local city council is paying Bing and they are the most frequently listed result.

It was only a list, how did it end up like this?

Nearly every local search is a leading indicator of buying intent and, therefore, is worth more money when served as a response instead of an authoritative response.

If you’re going to search for phone numbers you’ll want to ensure you enable verbatim searching under tools on Google, and put the number in quotes, perhaps in “xxx-xxx-xxxx” OR “(xxx) xxx-xxxx” forms. Many of the sites you mention are fake sites with fake contacts just for ad serving, and I’ve read in some few cases the scammers seeded the spoofed numbers they appear to call from on to the sites they control to see who googles their phone numbers.

Reverse spoof the numbers of FTC investigators and Google employees?

Maybe it was an attempt to make better their results for local results?

When searching for results from my country in DDG (picking the country in the drop-down below the search box) still returned results from the USA or other countries. Even when searching stuff in the local language. Maybe they tried to fix that because it really sucked, so much I never used it again for searching into local websites.

This is the one area it still ignores my location. I live in a town named after a UK city, there's several bigger towns in the US with the same name. I just searched "McDonalds city name." I got results for the locations at least half the US away from me, as well as Uber Eats GB.

I’m confused, you are searching for, specifically, a local phone number and you are upset that the machine interprets that as you looking for a local result? That’s what most people expect from a local number search.

Perhaps the incorrect thing is not your internet search results, but actually your phone carrier for lying to you and telling you that a caller has a local number?

If I search for a ten digit number, it is not helpful to return a local business that shares the last four digits.

The number is local, and occasionally I've searched and found the number was a local clinic or business that had legitimate reason to call me but not leave a message. In those scenarios, close to all ten of the numbers are found on the page.

The top result being my local police department because it shares the same area code and has maybe one other number in common is clearly a bad result. It does this even if the phone carrier isn't lying to me and the caller does have a local number, like the increasingly common political spam calls.

I suspect it's a failure to distinguish mobile searches (where people are legitimately looking for a business) from desktop searches.

In my country (Colombia) Google still has not removed those spam sites that just generate all possible numbers.

you can use true person search for numbers

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