That'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.
> DDG does the same, and adds a switcher so you can change between your local language and English. That's great, because depending on the search you want, it may be better done on either language.
DDG also has local and global search that you can switch, without switching the language of the site (so if I do a search with !ddgde I get German results but the DDG interface is still in English). Kagi does the same thing with !reg (for regional)
DDG skews very heavily towards your country setting indeed, and the default is indeed the USA, but Google is even worse. On DDG the locale selector is a switch displayed on every search results page. For Google, you have to use a VPN for the same effect.
I'm a Dutchman living in Germany speaking English at home and at work, so I switch between languages quite a lot: Dutch when I want to know local things (e.g. European laws, or recipes with ingredients that stores here actually carry), German when I need to know something like filing taxes or when trash is being picked up (I don't speak German yet, so I only do this when necessary), and English for everything else. Trying to do that on Google is nearly impossible. It somewhat picks up on the language of your query (certainly better than DDG picks up on that), but for English queries I'll still get a few German results, even after I click the "Change to English?" prompt (and I have to click every time, since I do not store cookies for Google). Like, thanks for this German forum thread when looking for an error message after I already set it to English... In DDG you can just flip a switch.
I use DDG for the simple reason that it gives me results in English all the time. I travel A LOT and Google is always trying to guess what language they should serve me my results in. If I'm sitting at a customer's site in Germany I'm not interested in German results. I also might not be able to login to Google on this computer so it gets my preferences.
It might sound like a silly reason but it's a big deal for me.
I remember being a little creeped out when Google first started automatically localising queries, but when I tried switching to DDG earlier this year I realised that I've become utterly dependent on it. I constantly had to think about whether to append my city or state to the query and even after doing so would often get American results. (For example, searching for anything relating to the WA government still turns up information about Washington, even when the country is set to Australia.)
That has been one reason why I prefer DDG to google since day 1; I can tell it to give me stuff from my region, or just international. Considering I use the internet in english 98% of the time but occasionally need something specific to Germany, that's very useful indeed :D
Google is better at localized stuff, but very often I prefer the English version. Like in the case of Wikipedia, if my goal was to look something up on wiki I’d always pick the English version, but on google it’s on the second or third result page.
Quora is another good example, it’s a place I often visit after search results, but on google.dk, it’s almost never a result, possibly because it’s not in danish.
DDG is much better, but once in a while when I’m searching for something very specific that I know google will first, I’ll do the !g.
If I’m looking up anything technical or comitting an act of google programming, I’ll always go straight to google.
The other day I was looking for some pipeextenders for our shower though, and neither bing, google or DDG were able to help. I ended up finding them by searching on amazon. Google was 100% commercials for plumbers and completely useless otherwise. DDG and bing had no clue what I was looking for. A few years ago, google would have been able to help, I know, because google helped me find our current ones.
And I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. The upside is that if I want German results, I can just go to Google - no annoying configurations, just DDG for English and Google for German. Still, I really resent this behavior by Google.
This. At least DDG gives you the option (prominently) to quickly and easily "nationalise" a query, if you want to, and doesn't try to impose its guess on you.
I've often found it annoyingly hard to get Google products back to a language I understand while traveling (no, the "append `&hl=en` to the URL" trick doesn't always work...)
This, searching tech related topics, world news etc. works well enough but when I try to search for (not english) local content the top 10 results often aren't even specific to my country.
It seems to be just lumping results together by language without putting enough weight on location.
Funny thing is, I have just the opposite issue with google.
While traveling, it constantly tries to force me to use the local version even if I don't want to (redirecting from google.com etc.) which puts more weight on local results.
Which is very helpful because with Google, in spite of some available settings, it's impossible to know what kind of custom/localized results being served.
In DDG, I turn it on (mine is Germany toggle as well) for finding restaurants and local support sites, and turn it off when I search anything programming related. Works well so far. I used the infamous "!g" rarely in the last few months.
Also Google without country redirection, my pet peeve. I can't use Google in private browsing mode any more since it insists redirecting to German results (yes, I'm currently physically in Germany), so I've started using DDG too.
I use DDG from Norway. In DDG there is a prominent checkbox to localize for searches there. Checking it gives the necessary localization even for queries in English.
I got quite tired of Google only showing me local (Brazilian) stores when I search for the name of a product in English. Or completely translating my search queries when I get some compiling error on libraries.
Good thing is that with DDG, I can simply use the !g command, and Google won't know I'm making the query from Brazil, and won't be able to localize it at all.
Maybe it was an attempt to make better their results for local results?
When searching for results from my country in DDG (picking the country in the drop-down below the search box) still returned results from the USA or other countries. Even when searching stuff in the local language. Maybe they tried to fix that because it really sucked, so much I never used it again for searching into local websites.
Where google has lost me is on country detection. It's virtually impossible to change country context.
NCR feature disappeared, and even choosing a specific language for the search results won't prevent some results from one's country to bubble up at the top (i.e. if I am in France, setting the interface in english and asking results for 'any region' will still boost french results)
It's just huge PITA to search for resources in a global context, which is the majority of my searches. DDG is a lot more sensible and manageable in this respect.
I think they push localisation because it makes sense for the user. In Europe, queries for at least 10 countries will usually be answered by the same data center and are still localised. The main reason why I still often use Google instead of DDG is to find localised content where you can't localise by language (e.g. finding UK specific issues).
These are good points, though I think ddg really shines in it's focus on the query, and not trying to be too clever.
Google tends to put too much weight on regional proximity and browser language settings, sacrificing the relevance to the query. I guess their approach works for a majority of people and queries, but there are so many times it just feels wrong.
E.g. on a simple query : http://imgur.com/ezKUm
(I am located in France, so french results come first. the two windows are in incognito mode for fairness, it's worse when logged in)
Sometimes I want results from StackOverflow, in English. On Google getting this right was a PITA.
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