What does it use? A reason I switched was to stop localisation of searches, and the dropdown at the top of the page used to be great for that but now doesn’t seem to do much.

For example if I search “pergola” then I get local pergola providers: good. But if I check the box next to my country flag (I.e. to turn localisation off) I _still_ get local pergola providers. Even if I change the region to another country I still get local results (though further down the page).

My country isn’t well known for pergolas as far as I know, and the effect looks bigger than the search reacting to language differences. So why do I still get local results?

You still get local results because that toggle is just one of the signals we use to get search results. Turning it off basically just says “don’t send this country as a signal."

If you selected a different country from the dropdown next to that toggle, instead of switching that toggle off, I would expect that to return results from the selected country instead of showing local results.

I would also expect that but that is not what I see. There are the ads at the top of the page which I do expect to be localised, but further down the page I get local results for my (quite small) country which I would not expect to get if I was in the country that I’ve selected as the search country.

Is there a way that I could use ddg that would return the same result for me as someone else would get? Not someone specific, but a an unbiased result so that I can know that if someone else searched with the same (lack of) parameters they will get the same results?