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A comment on Improving DuckDuckGo (2019). Parent comment

Re:Improving DuckDuckGo (2019) by phillc73 on Sunday February 20, 2022 @03:54PM (#30409180)
I disagree. I specifically searched for Salzstiegl ski club, I don’t really care about the language, just return the website I am looking for. Why does Google return the correct result first, regardless of language?

I also tried setting DDG to “All Regions” and the results were not better.

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Re:Improving DuckDuckGo (2019) by iso1631 on Monday February 21, 2022 @06:39AM (#30414639)
By phrasing it that way you're searching in English, it seems a reasonable choice to return sites that are in English.

If I search DDG for "US President", the first results are the English Wikipedia page for "President of the United States" and "List of presidents of the united states"

If I search for "US-Präsident", I get "Liste der Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten" and "Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten - Wikipedia" from Germany wikipedia, and fairly high up is a link to zeit [0]

That Zeit link doesn't appear if I search in English.

It seems that DDG puts the language used of the search fairly high in the weighting. That's reasonable to me. If I search "Nicolas Sarkozy im Gefängnis", I get German stories about the French President.

I can see both arguments, I don't think differing weights for language is an indictment of a search algorithm specifically though.

[0] https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2022-02/joe-biden-us-pra...

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