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I have the opposite: I'm in Canada and from France, but if I search for anything in French on ANY google (.com/.ca/.fr) I get Quebec stuff, whereas if I put the

by cmehdy 6y ago

I have the opposite: I'm in Canada and from France, but if I search for anything in French on ANY google (.com/.ca/.fr) I get Quebec stuff, whereas if I put the "France" filter on DDG I do get actual results for France. It has become one of the most convenient things for me when trying to find some news in each country (similarly, selecting "Canada" when searching in English or French for Canada or Quebec).

graeme 6y ago
Oh I didn’t know about that, thanks. I tried researching a few covid things around the world and google gave me nothing but Canadian results. Even with -canada and the country name. Infuriating.
gibspaulding 6y ago
This has been coming up a lot in this thread and seems to be one of those bug vs feature situations. - Google sees you are speaking French and that you are located in Canada so they assume you want results from Quebec. - DDG sees you selected France, so you get French results. Google uses context/history/etc whereas DDG ignores all of that. From a privacy perspective DDG's less localized default results are a feature, and in your situation they are actually better results, but there are people in this thread who have run into issues where DDG just assumes US for any queries in English, or where switching location gives bad results for programing stuff. It's interesting seeing people's different reactions to this.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  It is a difference in features indeed, and I believe the region settings can also be found when using google - they're just 2-3 clicks away in a menu and force you to reload, where DDG has them right on the homepage. Basically Google assumes that I want stuff that is tied to my region regardless of who I am or what I do to hide/block any history tracking or browser fingerprinting. That has its own logic, and really for the average en-US user that works well enough anyway. The user expectation becomes a bit different if you're British living in the US or Australia, or if you're Spanish living in Argentina, or if you're French living in Canada, etc. Or if you need to find help about a product that isn't dominated by the US, a programming language that isn't developed in English first, etc etc. Probably not the bulk of the requests from Google's perspective, I guess.

by cmehdy 6y ago

graeme 6y ago

Oh I didn’t know about that, thanks. I tried researching a few covid things around the world and google gave me nothing but Canadian results. Even with -canada and the country name. Infuriating.

gibspaulding 6y ago

This has been coming up a lot in this thread and seems to be one of those bug vs feature situations. - Google sees you are speaking French and that you are located in Canada so they assume you want results from Quebec. - DDG sees you selected France, so you get French results. Google uses context/history/etc whereas DDG ignores all of that. From a privacy perspective DDG's less localized default results are a feature, and in your situation they are actually better results, but there are people in this thread who have run into issues where DDG just assumes US for any queries in English, or where switching location gives bad results for programing stuff. It's interesting seeing people's different reactions to this.

cmehdy 6y ago
It is a difference in features indeed, and I believe the region settings can also be found when using google - they're just 2-3 clicks away in a menu and force you to reload, where DDG has them right on the homepage. Basically Google assumes that I want stuff that is tied to my region regardless of who I am or what I do to hide/block any history tracking or browser fingerprinting. That has its own logic, and really for the average en-US user that works well enough anyway. The user expectation becomes a bit different if you're British living in the US or Australia, or if you're Spanish living in Argentina, or if you're French living in Canada, etc. Or if you need to find help about a product that isn't dominated by the US, a programming language that isn't developed in English first, etc etc. Probably not the bulk of the requests from Google's perspective, I guess.