Make me feel better about Duck Duck Go Search?

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Hi, I’ve been using the DDG browser and search on and off for a bit. Specifically trying to contain more controversial stuff like politics into it. .

I just searched on the DDG browser with the DDG search, “2026 midterm primary results” hoping to find the 5 states that had primaries last night. The top horizontal scrolling results were all Michigan. Then the fucking AI bot that I thought I turned off. Then finally the real results…except the real results were 100% local to my state. My states primaries were months ago. There is no rewsonvehy my search should have yielded anything local to my state, and certainly not the entire first page.

Can someone shed a light onto why it would have done this? It feels invasive, at least with Google I can pretend that they know my location because I told them. But DDG? Nah, shits weird.

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fucking AI bot

I don’t know about the browser, but you can use noai.duckduckgo.com and the AI thing will always be disabled without depending on a cookie or anything

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This is the way to go. This way, it’ll persist even across cookie purges, browser containers, etc.

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In case it’s something you’re worried about, noai.duckduckgo.com will be the referral URL when you go to a site that was fetched from there.

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Unless you are using a VPN it’ll be estimating your location via IP address

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This makes sense, thanks! How precisely does an IP address give me away? State level, metropolitan area, city, street?

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Depending on the size of your city, they can estimate down to at least the city. In big cities or really small towns you can get it down to a street. In the event that your ISP has a data breach, they can see your exact house address.

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Also depends on your provider’s infrastructure. On mobile data, I get sorted into a rough geographic region correctly. When I’m on my home WiFi, I usually get placed about 200-300km away from my real location.

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Without metadata, municipal area. For larger cities that could be at the street or building level, for out in the country it’s wherever your ISPs trunk or fiber breakout is.

With metadata, often times right to your front door. With the isps metadata absolutely to your door.

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DuckDuckGo Search simply guesses your location using a GEO::IP lookup with the IP address that’s automatically sent to us via your device; then we throw away the IP address. […] The next time you perform a local search, selecting “Use Location” will send us a random location nearby, while hiding your actual location from DuckDuckGo. […] If you’d rather choose a custom location instead, you can pick “Set Location on Map” instead of “Use Location.” This bypasses the browser location permission, but still keeps your precise location anonymous to us.

I’ve just switched back to Brave, because (No AI) DDG keeps localizing results, despite region filter set to “All regions”; which really bugs me. If you want to disable Brave’s annoying AI “feature” (the reason I switched to DDG), without having to store a cookie: install the Redirector addon and ‘Create new redirect’ with:

Example URL: https://search.brave.com/search?q=test

Include pattern: https://search.brave.com/search?q=*

Redirect to: https://search.brave.com/search?q=$1&summary=0

Edit: Lemmy reformatting contents of the code block

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SearXNG will aggregate search results from Wikipedia, Google, DDG, Statpage, etc all in one service.

If you’re using a GPS enabled device than I would suggest prohibiting your browser from accessing your location, that and use a VPN as your public IP has a rough geolocation of where you live.

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try brave search. you can add it to your browser as an additional search engine using this https://search.brave.com/search?q=%25s

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