this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Search engines should not use locational data including IP address to provide "more relevant" results. Checking for restaurants or weather forecast? You should have to manually add the relevant search terms. Want results in a specific language? You should have to manually apply this filter.
Convenience is not worth the potential harm of locationally biased search results.
For example, where I live is like White Nationalist Central Station. My search results are thus far more likely to net me results with a pro-US/nationalist skew, thus potentially entrenching or normalizing harmful beliefs.
Whenever I've tried bringing this up with Techlords, I get a feeble, "B-but then you couldn't say 'restaurants near me' UnU" and like ... good? It's not like it's hard to type city and state in the search field.
I've never found a search engine that even has this as an option. Even Sear XNG instances net results that are clearly aligned with the location of the instances server.
A Kagi dev even lied to me when I was looking into that as an alternative, saying they don't use location, when it's pretty easy to determine that they do.
I also don't want a "good" algorithm. I also don't want to see big corporate sites prioritized either. If some backwoods nobody has a site that's more relevant, show it to me. I feel like pre-Google search engines were better, but that's another vent for another day.
Now where did I put my false teeth and walker???
Not a small hill and I could not agree more. This is relevant to Noam Chomsky “manufacturing consent”.
The first time i searched for a business online the results came from a city on the other side of the planet. I'm ok with getting search results in my area.
That's on you for not entering the proper search terms. User error.
Edit: Also, good. That's the way it should be! Which search engine did you use to get that result? I've been looking for something like that.
ip adress only gives the nearest big city. information like this is pretty useful to show you info based on your state/province.
yes I don't think a search engine should promote more extremist views but it's pretty nice if when I search 'left party' I get a left party from my country, and not the American democratic party.
With duckduckgo you can disable the country filter thingo to get international results
Oh believe me, I know. DDG was the first one I tried, and I tested it with every configuration possible. Like many other search engines such as startpage and kagi, you sure can do this in the settings, but it will do absolutely nothing to stop it from using your IP address to net locationally biased results specific to your current location. You may assume it would function like this, but it doesn't.
I even tried their html and lite versions, but although it was less cluttered and much more pleasant to use, it still provided results that were very clearly based on my IP address.
I'm not even sure what those settings do because they appear to have no function. Maybe they change language and currency on some sites for convenience, but again, that's not what I'm talking about in my comment! I'm saying a search engine should not use any locational data whatsoever to adjust results. And if you reply "well, good luck finding one because it doesn't exist," then congratulations, you understand my comment! They don't exist because we've all sacrificed our societal wellbeing for the sake of the smallest convenience.
Even if changing it to another country/region worked (it doesn't), we'd still have the problem of netting biased results based on what country I switch it to. That would be akin to searching while using my VPN, which once again, does not solve the problem of search engines using IP address to provide locationally biased results.
have you actually properly tested that the results in your location are more extremist? like compared with using a vpn on ddg?
You know what's hilarious about this basically non-functional setting? If I toggle the switch off, it provides results based on my IP address's location, but if I toggle it to "UK" it will also provide some results for the UK city that my town is named after, without me ever providing the name of my town lol
DDG is a for-profit brand that's a lot more nefarious than people think. They've even succumbed to AI.
Just tried setting no country, then ducked "wine".
Results were definitely still from my country first.
When I set display language to US English, results came up from the US, instead.
When I set it to French, it shows French websites at the top.
So the language you set affects what websites you are shown in the results. That sucks.
But you can actually just turn off ads in the settings. That's pretty fucking neat!
Even the lite and html versions of DDG will provide locationally biased search results. There's no way around this. Best you can do is use a VPN, but then you've still got the problem of reading locationally biased results, just for a different location. It sucks.
100% agree.
To add to this, when I'm looking up something online I want info provided by the internet in general, not just by my next door hillbilly.
EDIT: Downvoted by my next door hillbilly and his siblings