5 ms·
It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's espe
by speps 7y ago
It's only good enough when you're in the US, I live in the UK and DDG consistently returns non local results even though the country is set correctly, it's especially annoying given how many US cities are named after their UK counterpart.
- 4ad 7y agoThat means I should try DDG. I NEVER EVER want local results, and Google always gives me local results. If I'd want local results I would put my country or my city in the search query.
- motogpjimbo 7y agoAlso in the UK. It's noticeable that for many search terms, DDG's top autocomplete suggestion is the term you just typed, with "uk" tacked on the end of it. That suggests that many users in the UK are finding DDG's search results to be too US-centric.
- KuiN 7y agoThis is _by far_ my biggest issue with DDG. I've been trying to use it for most of my searching and I'm fine with having to append '!g' to ~25% of my searches, it's not ideal, but whatever, I can manage. Having to append 'uk' to 90% of searches after the first results page is full of useless American shit, for search terms that Google UK handles flawlessly, gets old, very quick.
- lftl 7y agoIt's not just US-centric. DDG is just a little bad about local queries in general. With Google, if I'm looking for a local business, or something in the news locally, there's a decent chance I can just search for it and I'll find what I'm looking for. With DDG I need to explicitly tell it the locale I'm interested in. On top of that I live in a small city that shares a name with a larger city. Google understands this and gives me results for my local, smaller city, but DDG needs to be explicitly told city name, state name.
- EnderMB 7y agoThis is my only gripe with DDG. For daily use, it's fine, but it's awful for local results or anything that requires a map or directions.
- AdmiralGinge 7y agoI agree, I use it as my main search engine as I'm trying to go Google-free at home but finding UK-centric things is annoying. I guess we must just be a much smaller market for them.
- alessioalex 7y agoUnfortunately this is the same for Romania as well, no local results are returned even though the country was set correctly.
- ObsoleteNerd 7y agoSame for Australia. I use DDG exclusively on all devices for a few years now, and overall it works great for me. I probably use !g once or twice a month, if that. But.. Even though I have the Australia button turned on, it doesn’t seem to do anything. So every time I need something local, I add “site:.au” to the end of the query then it works great again.
- simias 7y agoI use DDG, I'm not in the US and I never really felt that was an issue. If I'm looking specifically for something local I'd sooner use google maps directly anyway, not just a random web search.
- AdamSC1 7y agoDo you have the UK toggle turned on? Improving local results internationally is a major priority for the team currently - if you find queries where this isn't working well, hitting the feedback button in the bottom right of the screen is a huge help!
- Doctor_Fegg 7y agoWhy not default to having the UK toggle on for UK users?
- jstanley 7y agoAll you need to do is type "uk" at the end of the query. I now do this automatically if I want UK-specific results, it's not a problem.
- friseurtermin 7y agoThat's the reason I much prefer DDG over Google. When I want the news about politics in my country or restaurants in my town, I switch to local results in my language and region with the simple click of a button. Sometimes I want results from StackOverflow, in English. On Google getting this right was a PITA.
- sedatk 7y agoIt's not even good enough in the US.
- wdutch 7y agoI'm from the UK and have used duckduckgo as my default search engine for about 3 years. It's probably due to my specific searching habits but I have never noticed the issue you have.