I use DDG, but I have the same exasperation. Even appending 'Melbourne' to a search, I'm liable to get results from a tiny town in Florida rather a metropolis in Australia.

It's frustrating, because for geographical based results, I'm forced to drop back to Google consistently, and Google's getting worse and more user hostile/advertiser friendly.

There is a box at the top of the results page which you can tick to get country specific results

Yeah, but it's just not very good. Set the UK tick box and it will still throw a lot of US results into the mix. Adding "UK" and "manchester" or whatever in the search does a much better job than DDG's country specific tick box. Of course even that isn't great as it'll often give a business in manchester NH, pop 100k over the city of 3m just down the motorway. Even with keywords and DDG's tick box set.

It's a minor annoyance that I've got used to, and hasn't persuaded me to go back to Google (I've used DDG as first choice for probably a little over 5 years now).

If DDG can't deliver the goods, !b (bing) is second choice, !mill (Million Short) probably third, then as appropriate, a mix of !azuk (amazon UK), !w, !ox (oxford dictionary) and a mix of others including !g as last resort. !g is so rarely better or helpful that I wonder why I still sometimes bother.

Edit: I think the real problem is with ICANN. .com should have been kept for global or multinational sites, and the USA used .co.us and .us generally for sites of national interest, as France uses .fr, Germany .de and UK .uk etc.

Is there a bang command for turning this on and off? I could not find any in their list.

yes, likewise, I'm in New Zealand, and trying to find local stuff on DDG is a very poor experience. I'll swap to google for this.

Startpage shows more relevant local results for me, it's essentially a proxy to Google search. DDG supports redirect to Startpage by using "!s".