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Comment by ldng | Hacker News Reader

For about the last to years I've seen the bubble effect creeping in. And, sorry no offence to you personally, to be blunt, I'm not interested in damage control.

When I make a generic search unrelated to a hobby I have and I get as top answer something about my hobby, it's a very red and very flashing red flag of bubble effect.

The nail in the coffin has happened this weekend when some un-asked for auto-correct prevented me from searching what I wanted. The moment a tool gets in the way (whatever the good intentions are), I drop the tool. And, no, most of the time DDG don't know better than me.

Several people have been calling your founder on this, here, me included, and have been ignored. DDG might not need early adopter anymore. Fine by me, I'll move on.

Sorry for the bluntness but the truth is you already lost my as a user.

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On the first point about bubble effect, DuckDuckGo never uses past searches to generate search results, that hasn’t changed and will not change. Is that something you’re seeing on the search results page or maybe in your browser?

What does it use? A reason I switched was to stop localisation of searches, and the dropdown at the top of the page used to be great for that but now doesn’t seem to do much.

For example if I search “pergola” then I get local pergola providers: good. But if I check the box next to my country flag (I.e. to turn localisation off) I _still_ get local pergola providers. Even if I change the region to another country I still get local results (though further down the page).

My country isn’t well known for pergolas as far as I know, and the effect looks bigger than the search reacting to language differences. So why do I still get local results?

You still get local results because that toggle is just one of the signals we use to get search results. Turning it off basically just says “don’t send this country as a signal."

If you selected a different country from the dropdown next to that toggle, instead of switching that toggle off, I would expect that to return results from the selected country instead of showing local results.

I would also expect that but that is not what I see. There are the ads at the top of the page which I do expect to be localised, but further down the page I get local results for my (quite small) country which I would not expect to get if I was in the country that I’ve selected as the search country.

Is there a way that I could use ddg that would return the same result for me as someone else would get? Not someone specific, but a an unbiased result so that I can know that if someone else searched with the same (lack of) parameters they will get the same results?

Sorry for the bluntness, but the truth is you're being a giant asshole to someone that stepped in to learn more about your situation from your perspective to see how the company they work for lost you as a customer. They could have been there for one day or a decade, and may or may not have anything to do with the place the product is at.

You expect some of this from a company perspective, as unhappy users are normally the loudest, but this was an individual trying to learn from you and you just shit on them.

Poor form, dude.

I am not shitting on the guy, I literally said : "sorry no offence to you personally". I am crossed with DDG that for sure.

And I said, many people have complained, here on HN about it, only to be met with the same damage control over and over.

But granted, I could have phrased all that differently. You're right.

Your not caught up on how our culture is changing.

This is the new normal.

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