Try using it outside the US. Then you get results halfway across the world. :(

Example: if I search DDG for "Worcester" (a significant city near my home in south-central England), 28 of the top 30 results are Worcester, Massachusetts.

There is a toggle at the top of the page where I can choose "United Kingdom". That fixes it. But the default should be "worldwide" or "localised by IP address", not "US".

I promise I don't mean this in a snarky way, but: isn't the behavior you're describing almost the exact opposite of not being tracked?

Or, put another way: does "[chain name] grubhub [zipcode]" still do what you are describing?

Heh, as one might expect, "there's a bang for that" which will save you two characters: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=grubhub

I'm generally OK with a search engine using my IP Address to provide localized results. I don't think that's really a privacy concern as that is exposed to everyone. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that though?

What I mean, though, is I wouldn't mind if duckduckgo did localized searches based on IP geolocation. There are no privacy implications for this as long as the results are not logged anywhere.

Maybe they could add geolocation data to the query if the query contains keywords like "near me" and similar. No user tracking involved.