When I search for “uva”, all the first results point to university of virginia, instead or university of amsterdam, even though the latter has more students, is older and higher ranked. The former does not even contain uva in their URL while the latter is uva.nl. From a neutral, international point of view, why should this Virginia school rank higher in searches than UVA?
Situatiouns like these are what ultimately led me to switch from Duckduckgo back to google, and i test these things everytime I consider a new search. What is the use of privacy if the search results are not relevant to me?
The chosen country is important. `uva` may be more commonly associated with the University of Virginia in the US. For Netherlands (same query) https://search.brave.com/search?q=uva&country=nl will correctly point to Universiteit van Amsterdam.
At present we default to country US. We're looking to implement better defaults soon.
Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to address my problem, however me having to change the country manually sounds like an additional workaround. I wish you the best luck though with your search!
The whole point of DDG is to respect privacy. That means knowing as little about its users as possible. The country select actually improves the (impression of) privacy for me.
Situatiouns like these are what ultimately led me to switch from Duckduckgo back to google, and i test these things everytime I consider a new search. What is the use of privacy if the search results are not relevant to me?