Episode Details

In this episode, Greg and John (Search) discuss local search results, and how we help you find local cafes, restaurants, and business, without knowing your precise location.

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Greg: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering or approach to AI. I’m Greg. I work on the search engine here at DuckDuckGo. With me today is John. John, would you like to introduce yourself?

John: Hi, I’m John. also work here at DuckDuckGo on the search engine and I’ve been focused on working on local search for most of my time here.

Greg: Awesome. Yeah, that’s kind of what we wanted to talk about today is local search. And so I’m looking forward to chatting with you a little bit about how local search works, how we do it at DuckDuckGo and get into some of the challenges that we have as a private search engine and how we solve those. Local search generally, it’s kind of maps related searches. whether you’re searching for places, businesses, restaurants, those kinds of search queries we kind of call local searches. We have a couple different versions of a map that shows up on the search results page. When you do one of those searches, either you’re searching for something kind of in a city and you put the name of that city in your search query, or if you search for something near you, have ways to provide those results. still in a privacy preserving way. So maybe as a starting point, I thought it would be good to just, if you could walk us through a little bit of the life of a local search query, how it goes from kind of something the user has submitted to us to what we decide to show on the page.

John: Yeah. So we start with a, we get a user query. So somebody type something in and sends the query to us. And we try to figure out whether that would benefit from some sort of mapping information. So maybe the query contains a number and a few words and then drive or street or road. And you know, that looks like an address. So we’ll show a map of that address. Other common patterns are, you know, common. types of businesses like restaurants, hotels, cafes, and those sometimes come in with location indications. know, cafes in New York City or cafes in Paris. And sometimes they don’t, sometimes it’s just cafes or cafes near me. So we kind of have to handle both those types of situations. And the ones that are nearby are really kind of the more interesting ones. because we have to find a way to figure out where Nearby is for the user. And we have to do that in a very privacy-respecting way because that’s our whole thing. So the browser, the web browser that you’re using will send a location. But we don’t just straight up use that because we deal with lot of partnerships where we have to get some data from our partners at Apple and TripAdvisor. And we don’t want to just send them raw user locations because that is a privacy issue. So what we do is we’ll kind of add some noise to it. So if you say you’re at, you know, this exact location in a city, instead of