Country restrictions don't work in Brave Search Engine

There have been plenty of similar posts about Brave Search, so it’s clearly been an issue for a while, but this problem definitely still persists. What’s the point in having an option to select a country when the search engine just ignores it? I’m even searching in English, so it’s not a language related issue. I’ve tested all the combinations with local results on and off, all regions, selecting my country, the US, etc and while the results may vary slightly, my conclusions are pretty clear - the country selector doesn’t work.

As an example, searching for something to buy will usually return the US Amazon page for the item, but not the item on AU Amazon (every other major search engine returns this as the first result). Not including discussions and videos, the first (and only) Australian result for a recent search for Redragon K652 was number 7, and there were several results on the first page from Belgium, India, Bangladesh, and of course plenty from the US. The second page was similar but included a UK site and no Australian sites. Searching only US sites, the same Australian site still came up, as well as one from the Phillipines, but none of the other countries.

I understand that some local sites may still just use a .com address, but it’s extremely rare that a local site would use another country’s ccTLD like .in - so it’s pretty obvious when the results are well-known sites like rtings, Aliexpress, etc. or include other ccTLDs.

I’m no web developer, and certainly no search engine expert, other than using almost every single one of them since the early 90s - but it seems like implementing something as trivial as simply excluding ccTLDs other than the country selected and keeping a list of the top 1000 .com sites and which country they belong to would be much more effective than whatever is being used currently.

Did you ever get this working ? it’s been doing my head in for so long now and im sick of searching for an Australian website and it returning an american or Uk site instead. like you say, amazon.com.au is never a result i get, its always the american version

Nope, I gave up months ago - it’s just a waste of time trying to use this search engine. It looks like they’ve abandoned it, because nothing has been fixed in months.

I had to go back to Google - it’s all biased results, but at least they’re usually relevant.

@Nukkels btw, just want to say this is a known issue. As was said by someone on Search team:

Known issue, partially coming from the big diff. of population and WDP users, thus data in those countries vs US.

If you’re not familiar with what WDP is, it’s Web Discovery Project and you can read more about it at https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-What-is-the-Web-Discovery-Project

Essentially it’s how Brave indexes everything. If there aren’t a lot of users from regions opted into it, then there won’t be enough local results and it will populate the most relevant information as it can .