In consumer search there is a really long tail of questions (in 2017 15% of Google's daily queries have never been seen before[1]) and performance on this is very important.
I just searched for "lockdown rules for SA" (I'm in South Australia and we just had a new 20 person cluster, so we are going back into lockdown).
On DDG the first results was a Guardian article which was good, but then the rest were a mix of South African articles and blog spam. There were no SA Gov pages on the first page of results.
On Google the first result was the South Australian gov site with the rules, the second was the Guardian article, then more SA Gov pages and at result 8 I got a South African result.
Hrm, I think it's extremely iffy to abbreviate South Australia like that in a search query. You don't need the "for" either.
BTW, when I perform the same search, Google's first result is
"What Are the Lockdown Rules for South Africa? A Guide for ..." and all the other results on the first page are about South Africa too. (Note: I'm in Japan)
> Hrm, I think it's extremely iffy to abbreviate South Australia like that in a search query.
Everyone in Australia uses "SA" - this is one of the reasons why location based context is important.
> You don't need the "for" either.
I worked on consumer search for a few years, and on text based search word like "for" are helpful to get exact match. Even if the term frequency of "for" on its own isn't particularly useful "for SA" absolutely is. (And these days with neural ranking using sub-word parts it is even more useful).
Searching for "lockdown rules" "sa" (together) just now gave a bunch of South Australian specific results with the "Australia" localisation setting enabled.
With the localisation setting disabled, all the results were indeed about South Africa instead.
I just searched for "lockdown rules for SA" (I'm in South Australia and we just had a new 20 person cluster, so we are going back into lockdown).
On DDG the first results was a Guardian article which was good, but then the rest were a mix of South African articles and blog spam. There were no SA Gov pages on the first page of results.
On Google the first result was the South Australian gov site with the rules, the second was the Guardian article, then more SA Gov pages and at result 8 I got a South African result.
https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...