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What is the smallest hill you would die on?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Asklemmy
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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???
With duckduckgo you can disable the country filter thingo to get international results, and you can also change it to another country
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?