5 ms·

Lately the main thing that's been greatly hurting DDG's usability for me is the search results being influenced by geolocation. It's quite frustrating to see co

Lately the main thing that's been greatly hurting DDG's usability for me is the search results being influenced by geolocation. It's quite frustrating to see completely unrelated search results that just so happen to have my city's name in their title (especially when I searched in a completely different language). Plus I frequently use proxies which makes the entire scheme meaningless either way. At least a way to switch to non-localized results would be nice to have. (As for my more subjective opinion, a privacy-first search engine looking at your real-world location by default might be making the wrong compromise in the first place.)

yegg 3y ago
On this last point, a search engine has to provide local results to be useful, e.g., local weather, restaurants, etc. We do that always in anonymous fashion, as explained here: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/anonymous-localized-results/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/an...
- floydnoel 3y ago
  Could you make it opt-in? I suppose some people want to go to DDG to find the weather, but I never would. If I want a local business, I open Maps and search. I would never want any location data to influence any of my searches.
  - tintedfireglass 3y ago
    as companies go mainstream every company adopts the same methods. As time passes by ddg is starting to feel more like the YBG (Yandex Bing Google) search engines and less like a privacy friendly search engine.
    - yegg 3y ago
      That doesn't seem fair at all. Our privacy protections have only gotten stronger as we've protected you more and more beyond search.