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Comment by OtherShrezzing | Hacker News Reader

In the UK we've got amazing National Health Service informational websites[1], and regional variations of those [2]. For some issues, you might get different advice in the Scottish one than the UK-wide one. So, if you've gone into labour somewhere in the remote Highlands and Islands, you'll get different advice than if you lived in Central London, where there's a delivery room within a 30 minute drive.

Google's AI overview not only ignores this geographic detail, it ignores the high-quality NHS care delivery websites, and presents you with stuff from US sites like Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic is a great resource, if you live in the USA, but US medical advice is wildly different to the UK.

[1] https://www.nhs.uk [2] https://www.nhsinform.scot

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> ignores the high-quality NHS care delivery websites, and presents you with stuff from US sites

Weird because although I dislike what Google Search has become as much as any other HNer, one thing that mostly does work well is localised content. Since I live in a small country next to a big country that speaks the same language, it's quite noticeable to me that Google goes to great lengths to find the actually relevant content for my searches when applicable... of course it's not always what I'm actually looking for, because I'm actually a citizen of the other country that I'm not living in, and it makes it difficult to find answers that are relevant to that country. You can add "cr=countryXX" as a query parameter but I always forget about it.

Anyway I wasn't sure if the LLM results were localised because I never pay attention to them so checked and it works fine, they are localised for me. Searching for "where do I declare my taxes" for example gives the correct question depending on the country my IP is from.

The problem is when your IP is temporarily wrong or you are just traveling and suddenly you can't find anything...

But what if I don't want the search engine company to know where I am?

(I mean, I don't generally make a big secret of it. But still.)

Then you have to use a VPN and you can always use the cr= parameter to orient the results towards the region you want if your search is location-sensitive.

But I feel like this is quite an unrelated problem, IPs being linked to a country is a fundamental part of the current architecture of the Internet.

Just a point of one, but when you have a German SIM with a German contract in the German mobilephone network, Google thinks your're in Romania. I mean I don't mind that, because I don't need Google to know accurately where I am.

> For some issues, you might get different advice in the Scottish one than the UK-wide one

its not a UK wide one. The home page says "NHS Website for England".

I seem to remember the Scottish one had privacy issues with Google tracking embedded, BTW.

> So, if you've gone into labour somewhere in the remote Highlands and Islands, you'll get different advice than if you lived in Central London, where there's a delivery room within a 30 minute drive

But someone in a remote part of England will get the same advice as someone in central London, and someone in central Edinburgh will get the same advice as someone on a remote island, so it does not really work that way.

> if you live in the USA, but US medical advice is wildly different to the UK.

Human biology is the same, diseases are the same, and the difference in available treatments is not usually all that different. This suggests to me someone's advice is wrong. Of course there are legitimate differences of opinion (the same applies to differences between

> But someone in a remote part of England will get the same advice as someone in central London,

The current system might not have perfect geographic granularity but that doesn't mean it isn't preferable to one that gives advice from half the world away.

> Human biology is the same, diseases are the same, and the difference in available treatments is not usually all that different

Accepted medical definitions differ, accepted treatments differ, financial considerations, wait times and general expectations of service vary wildly.

England is not "half the world away" from Scotland.

No, the United States is.

They meant the US with Mayo.

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