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Weird things that DDG does:

- No geo prioritization. If I'm searching for things in (city I'm current in) I don't care for sites from companies located in (city in the US/Canada with the same name).

- You write "X in Y" (generic example) and autocomplete tries to "fix it with "Z in Y" thanks but I really mean "X in Y". Or sometimes it tries to fix it with even more unrelated things (though sometimes it makes sense).



Google does the same. Search for Warsaw while in Poland, yet use english search words. Most results will come up for things in Warsaw, Indiana. Including pages which google has tagged with "Warsaw, Indiana" so they clearly know that's where the results are coming from.


I'm from Poland and I just searched for 'Warsaw', 'Warsaw car rental' and 'Warsaw law office' using incognito mode and google.com and all of the results were for Warsaw, Poland.

It also detected that I'm in Poland and asked me if I want to switch to polish Google and filter results in polish language.


Same in Sweden. If you want to know what channels football matches are airing on here the following searches yield entirely different results:

Fotbolls vm

Football World Cup

The former gives you the correct site with the channels listed as the first answer but the second one doesn’t even have the channels on the first page.


I live in the Netherlands but grew up in the U.S. and I often go back and forth between Dutch and English when searching(depending mostly on context). I have also used my google account while living in the U.S. and later in the Netherlands (this used to really mess up google calendar). I’ve been searching for “World Cup” (English) on google.com. I get results in English, but they are parsed from the national Dutch news channel and they link directly to highlight clips on their YouTube channel. Seems like there is a probably a lot of complex integration between Google and local broadcasters to pull that off, and it might work just for me because I spent a lot of time setting language and locale settings to try and accommodate my unique use case.


They specifically advertise that they don't lock you into a filter bubble.

A geo-bubble is a filter bubble.


Not necessarily

A filter bubble is building a story of previous searches to get more relevant results.

So the first time you search 'Python' on Google with no history it might prioritize snakes or the computer language, but after some clicks it will know better how to prioritize

Now, DDG correctly detects the country I'm in, but even with that set the results are weird and not always relevant.


Filters come in various forms, search history, language, location, OS, account-based history, etc.

Filtering my results based on my location is still a filter bubble. Filtering it based on anything, and not just showing me exactly the same results as everyone else who searched the same query is the definition of a filter bubble.

People who don't want to be bubbled use DDG. It's a big part of the reason it exists, and you want that changed. What you actually want is another search engine, which is probably Google since they have the most functional (in the sense of utility derived by the end user) filter bubbles.


You can set your filter bubble to your country! It's right under the search bar when you start a search.


You can enable region specific search in the settings.


There is literally an option for geo prioritization right next to the search bar.


Learn to use a search engine. Why did this become a lost skill? You can tell it exactly what you want it to find using quotes or explicitly stating a locality.


I've been using search engines since Yahoo and Altavista were relevant players in the search space, I think I know a trick or two.




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