Why aren’t my search results relevant to my location?

Are you noticing that the search results are not specific to your city? Maybe even sometimes in a different country?

As we are a privacy-friendly search engine, we don’t use your precise location to serve you locally targeted search results. 

That being said, there are a couple of things that you can do to work around this. 

Ensuring your search region is properly selected

The first time you search on Ecosia we try to determine where in the world you’re searching from generally through your IP address, so that we can provide you with search results from that country. 

If we don’t correctly detect where you’re searching from, you can change your search region to another location from Ecosia’s settings, or below the search bar after you’ve done a search. 

If you frequently delete your browsing history and cookies, you’ll notice that Ecosia’s settings, which include your search region, reset. That’s because they are saved within a cookie in the browser. You may need to select your search region again as a result. 

You can find a more thorough cookie guide here. You can, for example, create an exception so that Ecosia’s cookies don’t get deleted. 

Refining your search

You can always include more information in your search query to help you to find relevant results. For example, instead of a search for “sushi restaurant near me”, you can search for “sushi restaurant New York City”