Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'.
See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak.
Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
This isn't normal? Due to ISP internal networking, my exposed IP address either gets geolocated to my state capital or a state capital on the other side of the continent. And I like it that way. Wrong country might be annoying, but preferred language will get that right enough.
I get mistargeted geographic ads all the time; not on a VPN.
Heck, I even get ads in the wrong language.
Hint: Instead of noticing that I’ve been doing manual labor recently, and inferring that I’m not a native English speaker, just use contextual targeting: show me ads in the same language as the content I’m watching.
Ad blockers are making the problems tracking-based much, much worse. Whatever signal is left after people block aggressively block trackers is actually just noise. Hopefully the market will see this and self-correct.
Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'.
See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak.
Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.