> Google can and should customize search results based on location
I feel more and more these ideas of optimizing for 95% of the use cases give good result on paper but shitty lives for the 5% left.
I understand the good intentions behind that calculation, because making life easier for a huge majority of people should be a good thing.
But for instance boosting local results is one of the way you’ll make people often searching for foreign information miserable. Searching for remote places will most of time be met by random local businesses first. Web based international content will be outranked by local content, and your local newspaper bitching about heat waves when it’s just summer will outrank by far rock bands and manga titles.
Sometimes that’s the wanted behaviors, but for instance currently Google already works with strong preference for localised search, and that’s one of the things that pushed me to DDG.
In a way if Google wasn’t so massively successful I’d root for them to better serve mainstream searches. But in the position they are now I think it’s harder to say they should just care about the vast majority of people. Even 1% of their userbase is an incredibly huge number.
I feel more and more these ideas of optimizing for 95% of the use cases give good result on paper but shitty lives for the 5% left.
I understand the good intentions behind that calculation, because making life easier for a huge majority of people should be a good thing.
But for instance boosting local results is one of the way you’ll make people often searching for foreign information miserable. Searching for remote places will most of time be met by random local businesses first. Web based international content will be outranked by local content, and your local newspaper bitching about heat waves when it’s just summer will outrank by far rock bands and manga titles.
Sometimes that’s the wanted behaviors, but for instance currently Google already works with strong preference for localised search, and that’s one of the things that pushed me to DDG.
In a way if Google wasn’t so massively successful I’d root for them to better serve mainstream searches. But in the position they are now I think it’s harder to say they should just care about the vast majority of people. Even 1% of their userbase is an incredibly huge number.