Asklemmy

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???